Hope inspires the good to reveal itself.
—ANONYMOUS (OR ATTRIBUTED TO EMILY DICKINSON)
Briskly walking down the wide corridor of a massive steel-and-glass medical center in the Midwest, I was musing to myself about the impersonal nature of today’s health care system. Just then, the sound of Brahms’s “Lullaby” began to play through the hospital’s PA system.
I asked the head of nursing, who was escorting me to my grand rounds talk, about this charming music.
She said with a smile, “A baby was just born.”
Amazed by her response, I asked her to tell me more.
She explained that whenever a baby was born in that medical center, the maternity department would play Brahms’s “Lullaby.” The music was pumped into every room.
“Even the patient rooms?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes, and all of the departments: orthopedics, cardiac intensive care, the ER, the operating rooms, the administrative offices, the cafeteria, even the security command center,” she said proudly.
“Is it played for all births, even the difficult ones?” I asked in astonishment.
She replied, “Yes, it’s played for all births: natural births, preemie babies, and cesarean sections.”
As I looked around, I saw people who had been rushing to their next meetings pause for a breath. Conversations stopped and gave way to subtle grins. For a few moments, where there had been tension and stress, there was delight and ease.
Hospitals are magnets for suffering. They’re environments filled with a great deal of physical pain, fear, anxiety, and other discomforts. Staff tend to get swept up in the technical details of care, overwhelmed by patients’ suffering and their inability to respond to it.
Brahms’s “Lullaby” was a salve, a joyful reminder of the potential for new life that exists in any moment, an uplifting encouragement to go on even in the face of adversity. The music served as more than an announcement of feel-good optimism. For a short while, hope filled the air.
Hope is a subtle, sometimes unconscious attitude of heart and mind that is an essential resource in this human life. It is the ingredient that supplies the motivation for us to get up in the morning and look forward to the possibilities of a new day. It is an anticipation of a future that is good. Desmond Tutu, South Africa’s moral conscience and the outspoken critic of apartheid, once said, “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.”
Experts differ on whether hope is an emotion, a belief, a conscious choice, or all three. Václav Havel, the philosopher and first president of the Czech Republic, suggested that hope is “an orientation of the spirit.” I think of hope as an innate quality of being, an open, active trust in life that refuses to quit.
What we know for certain is that hope takes us beyond the rational. At times, this can be invaluable to our survival. Yet at other times, when hope is misunderstood, it can plunge us into delusion and become a hindrance to facing the facts of life.
To discern the real value of hope, we must draw a line between hope and expectation. Hope is an optimizing force that moves us and all of life toward harmony. It doesn’t arrive from outside; rather it is an abiding state of being, a hidden wellspring within us. When the mind is still and awake, we can see reality more clearly and recognize it as a living, dynamic process. Hope that is active has an imaginative daring to it, which helps us to realize our unity with all life and find the resourcefulness required to act on its behalf. We can sense the lightness, the buoyancy of this kind of hope, the enthusiasm and positivity it engenders. It energizes us to engage in activities that we imagine will enrich our future. This version of hope is a basic human need.
Yet our usual kind of hope is little more than wishful thinking. It’s frequently tied to an almost childlike belief, sometimes even blind faith, that an external agency or authority will bring about what we desire. Driven by our preference for a different set of conditions, this conventional view of hope is a rejection of what is present for us in the here and now. It is the flipside of fear.
Ordinary hope disguised as expectation is fixated on a specific outcome. This hope gets conflated with the desire for a certain future result. It becomes object-focused. It takes us outside of ourselves. The quandary is that when the outcome isn’t achieved, the object isn’t grasped, then our hopes are dashed.
Attaching our happiness to a specific outcome causes us all sorts of suffering. To manage that distress, we attempt to control everything that is happening around us. But we have no control over the weather on our wedding day, the moods of others, winning the lottery, or even receiving a cancer diagnosis. As we have seen, the law of impermanence trumps our best-laid plans.
In the ever-changing landscape of our lives, attachment to outcome posing as hope only generates anxiety and interferes with our ability to be present to our experience of life as it is unfolding in this very moment. My friend the late anthropologist Angeles Arrien advised that we be “open to outcome, not attached to outcome.” She wrote, “Openness and non-attachment help us recover the human resources of wisdom and objectivity.”
* * *
I watched as Fred visited his wife, Rachel, at Zen Hospice Project. She was dying of colon cancer, and Fred came every day to feed her watermelon. Not just a little bit, but what appeared to be an entire melon each time.
“Wow, you must really love watermelon!” I remarked to Rachel one day.
“Actually, I don’t care for it much,” she replied. “Fred read on the Internet that it would help me fight this cancer, so I eat it to keep him happy.”
Watermelon. I know, it sounds absurd. It’s not uncommon for desperate people to reach for all manner of cures. On occasion, some even work.
Fred loved Rachel and wasn’t able to accept the reality that his wife was dying. Clinging to the fantasy that he had discovered a secret cancer cure was a blind hope.
Late one night, I asked Fred to show me the website that claimed the watermelon cure. With enthusiasm, he read me the material out loud. Then suddenly, he became despondent, covering his face in his hands. He realized that earlier on, he had misread the website. It was suggesting not that watermelon was some miracle cure, but rather that consuming the fruit could help with hydration, and that hydration was an important part of healing.
After allowing time for him to feel the loss of his watermelon dreams, I asked Fred what he hoped for in what were likely his last days with Rachel.
He didn’t hesitate for one moment. “I hope to love her with my whole heart,” he said. “To love every part of her without reservation. To make sure she knows how blessed my life has been to be married to her.”
During the remaining week of Rachel’s life, I don’t think Fred once left her side.
Like Fred, those who are very ill and their loved ones frequently begin the journey toward death with an egoic hope for a miracle—for example, a full recovery from their cancer or the return of all their physical and mental capacities. What we are calling hope in these circumstances is really just an expression of our fear. We do not generate reliable solutions in this state because they emerge from our confusion.
Hope is an innate human quality that can positively contribute to a sense of wellness. Tossing hope away doesn’t seem helpful. Maybe we need to rework our understanding and application of hope.
I have found that with compassionate support, this hope can shift. It stops being about managing the symptoms we did not choose and cannot avoid, and instead turns toward discovering the value in living fully given our current conditions. Often it transforms into what I have come to call mature hope, a hope that takes us inside ourselves and toward finding the good in the experience.
Mature hope requires both a clear intention and a simultaneous letting go. This hope is not dependent upon outcome. In fact, hope is tied to uncertainty because we never know what is going to happen next. The hope is in the potential for our awakened response, not in things turning out a particular way. It is an orientation of the heart, grounded in value and trust in our basic human goodness, not in what we might achieve. That fundamental trust guides our actions and allows us to cooperate with others and to persevere, without attachment to a specific result. In illness, mature hope helps us come to a place of wholeness, even if a cure is unavailable.
When we relax our single-minded vision of the future—the idea that “this is the only way for things to happen”—we are no longer trapped by our conventional view of hope. We leave room for surprise. As Fred found, with flexibility and kindness, we can re-imagine hope even in a situation that appears hopeless. The energizing quality of mature hope helps us to remain open to the possibility that while life may not turn out the way we first thought, opportunities we never imagined may also arise.
Natural disasters, earthquakes, fires, and floods offer clear examples of devastating circumstances that dramatically disrupt everyday life. Homes are lost, people die. The unanticipated chaos impacts us in vastly different ways. Yet time and again, we have seen people come together in positive ways, feeding each other, acting bravely, befriending strangers, and bringing their best selves forward. Perhaps this is in part because we are thrust into the immediacy of life in an intense way, not unlike the blow of receiving a life-threatening diagnosis. Stories of people meeting impossible conditions with grace uplift us and inspire hope in the basic goodness and altruism of human beings.
Most of us choose comfort over truth. But when you think about it, we don’t grow and transform in our comfort zones. We grow when we realize we are no longer able to control all the conditions of our lives, and are therefore challenged to change ourselves. When we release our clinging to what used to be and our craving for what we think should be, we are free to embrace the truth of what is in this moment.
Mature hope embraces the truth that no matter what we do or don’t do, things will change. Change is constant and inevitable. Hope for an unchanging world quickly becomes discouragement. Instead, we need to trust in ourselves and each other, in right action and perseverance without despair.
I once met a man who planted ten thousand oak trees. He was at that time seventy years old. He didn’t know how many had grown to be adult trees, and he certainly would never see any of them in their full maturity. He said hope was a shared promise between him, the trees, and the children who would one day climb the oaks’ magnificent branches.
* * *
I never met Crystal. She just phoned one day out of the blue to ask if I would read The Tibetan Book of the Dead to her dying teacher, a world-renowned psychologist. I explained that it was a highly esoteric work and that some of its imagery could be quite frightening to the uninitiated. I wondered why Crystal thought her teacher might want me to read this book to her on her deathbed.
Crystal said, “She has been a remarkable teacher who has led a remarkable life, and we want her to have an equally remarkable death.”
Sensing the pressure this expectation might exert on her teacher, I responded, “Perhaps she wants a perfectly ordinary death.”
Crystal hung up on me, deciding, I supposed, to call someone else.
Later, she called back, explaining that after talking among themselves, she and the other students had realized that in their hearts, all they really wanted was to help their teacher die peacefully.
I agreed to help, provided we would make every attempt to learn what the teacher actually needed. I asked her to look and listen carefully to what the teacher was telling her.
“Oh, but I can’t,” Crystal replied. “She’s in a partial coma. She can’t talk.”
“Look more closely. Is she perspiring?” I asked.
“Yes,” Crystal said.
“Then go get a cool washcloth and place it gently on her head. She’s telling you that she has a fever.”
“Okay,” she said.
I asked, “Is she grimacing with any obvious signs of pain?”
“No,” Crystal replied.
“Wonderful. Then let’s try the next step,” I advised. “How is her breathing?”
“It’s very fast, somewhat erratic,” she said.
“Sit quietly beside her, following the rhythm of her breath. Breathe in as she breathes in; breathe out as she breathes out. There is no need to guide her. Just accompany her. In this way, you can provide a kind and loving presence, patiently attending to the moment-to-moment changes in her experience.”
Crystal continued in this way for over twenty minutes. The change in atmosphere was evident even over the phone.
“What’s happening now?” I asked.
“Well, her breathing is still quite fast, but I am much calmer now!” Crystal answered. Then she laughed. What a change from her tone when she’d first called.
So I said, “Just keep listening like this. Keep watching the tone of her skin. Listen to her breathing. See what happens when her eyes flutter. Watch her carefully. See everything as a communication with you. Let her show you the way. She’ll guide you through. She knows how to do this. We’ve been dying for hundreds of thousands of years.”
Then I expressed my admiration for Crystal’s tender care, and we hung up. The next day, she phoned to say that her teacher had died quite peacefully during the night, when most of the students were out of the room.
In our culture, we like to nurture a story of what it means to have a “good death.” We treasure the romantic hope that when people pass away, everything will be tied up neatly. All problems will have been resolved, and they will be utterly at peace.
But this fantasy is rarely the reality. The “good death” is a myth. Dying is messy. People who are dying often leave skid marks, dragging their heels as they go. Some people turn away from others and never look back. For many, the habits of a lifetime go unquestioned, and they fight fearfully to keep those habits in place. For others, their fight is like a badge of honor; they want to go down swinging. Very few people walk toward the immense challenge of dying and find peace and beauty there. But who are we to say how another should die?
In my experience, the romantic expectation of a good death places an immense and unnecessary burden on the dying. We may view it as a failure when people don’t go calmly into the night. “Oh, my mother didn’t see tunnels of light. She died terrified. It was an awful death,” I once heard a man complain. Many people feel like failures simply for dying in the first place because our culture is so steeped in the language of “fighting until the end.” Why should we further weigh the dying person down by judging how they go? As Crystal discovered, allowing our loved ones to have the experiences they need as they die is tremendously freeing for them and for us.
When I sit at the bedsides of people who are dying, my primary goal is to keep my heart open. I feel that I have a responsibility to support them wherever they are in their journey. I point to their internal resources. I try to illuminate capacities that they already have but may not recognize. Sometimes, people are able to see kindness in my eyes. This reflects back to them their own kindness, and suddenly, they are able to see themselves in a new way.
Emily was only thirty-four when she arrived at Zen Hospice dying of breast cancer. Before she fell into what a friend calls the “Twilight Sleep”—the sleep from which we rarely emerge—she shared with me the horrible torment she had suffered as a child at the hands of Ruth, her abusive mother.
When Emily’s condition grew critical, Ruth came from across the country to be at her daughter’s bedside. They hadn’t spoken in years, and there was very bad blood between them. The mother sat there pouring out her apologies for her past behaviors and begging her only daughter for forgiveness. Emily remained silent and unresponsive, as she had been for days.
Suddenly, Emily sat upright in bed and looked her mother straight in the eye. Then, powerfully and with perfect clarity, she said to Ruth, “I hate you! I’ve always hated you.” And then she died.
There was enormous suffering in that room. Ruth was in shock. She was living her worst nightmare. It was gut-wrenching that Emily’s last words were so harsh.
It is difficult to keep our hearts open in that kind of hell. Yet when we do, we may see beyond the immediate anguish and become aware of another possibility. Emily was finally able to tell her mother what was true, what she had been afraid to say all her life. It was horrible, but it was real. Truth-telling seems necessary for a future based on healing and mature hope.
Was Emily’s a “bad death”? Many people would say so. I’ve stopped judging. One person’s “good death” is another’s worst nightmare. Some want death to come suddenly, while others hope they will die slowly. Some people hope to be surrounded by loving family members, while some fear the interference of well-meaning others.
In the months after Emily’s death, I worked with Ruth to support her through her grief. It was a tough road. Yet taking responsibility for her past actions and facing the seemingly impossible truth of Emily’s hatred proved essential in her finding self-forgiveness. It was critical in healing the wounds and reconciling herself to her long-troubled relationship with her daughter that she not hope for a different past. Knowing that she could not alter conditions, that she could not change what had happened at Emily’s deathbed or go back and be a different sort of mother, Ruth was able, eventually, to accept what was so and make peace with it.
* * *
In death and in life, should we “hope for the best” or “expect the worst”? What if instead, we cultivated a non-judgmental attention and commitment to being with the truth of whatever is present? Suppose rather than choosing sides, we developed the mental clarity, emotional stability, and embodied presence to not be swept away by the cycle of ups and downs, of hopes and fears? Balanced equanimity gives rise to a resilience that is fluid and not fixed, trusting, adaptable, and responsive. Perhaps we might accept our past, ourselves, others, and the continually changing conditions of our lives “as is”—neither good nor bad, but workable.
It’s helpful here to take refuge in impermanence. Not in the expectation that things will turn out as we hope or fear, but in the fact that things will change whether we want them to or not.
We speak of living in the present moment. But where is this moment to be found? Is it a nanosecond that punctuates the space between past and future? To paraphrase St. Augustine, now is neither in time nor out of time. The elusive present moment is not measured by the tick-tock time of a clock, which we humans invented, nor is it separate from past or future. There is no time line, at least not as we conventionally think about it.
We all have experienced feelings of timelessness, when a moment expands a bit like a dream. When I remember my mother, who died more than forty-five years ago, isn’t the past then happening in the now? The present moment includes the past and also the potency for the future. My granddaughter is still an infant, so at the moment she is not consciously shaping her future. Yet the potential for that future lives within her right now, as it lives within each of us.
This is where the energy of hope has a place—not as a wish to be fulfilled or a plan to be formulated and executed, but in how we meet the ever-changing moment. The present moment includes all time; it is the all-inclusive now. The present moment could best be described as the flow of life. We are continually being shaped by it, and we are shaping it through the way we meet and respond to it.
Don’t wait is an encouragement to step fully into life. Don’t miss this moment waiting for the next one to arrive. Don’t wait to act on what is most important. Don’t get stuck in the hope for a better past or future; be present.
* * *
David was living with serious Parkinson’s disease. At first, his body’s deterioration frustrated and frightened him. He noticed how often he would relate to his body from a wish for it to be another way.
If only I could slow the progress of this disease, he would think. How and when will my illness get worse? he would worry. Waiting for his circumstances to change, hoping for a different future, he would be mostly in his head and riddled with anxiety.
Fortunately, David is a dedicated meditator, and over time, he was able to shift his mind-set. His thoughts would quiet down. He would relax and become more peaceful, more reflective. He described such moments as “timeless” and told me, “I see now how the constant desire to have things be other than what they were was blinding me to the positive aspects of my Parkinson’s experience. Now I focus on my gratitude for those who care for me. I trust in my capacity to meet whatever challenges come my way.”
David said, “In my ordinary mind, I have a hope that I am going to change my illness. It is the object of my fear, and I want to control that fear. But I am only setting myself up for disappointment. I get lost. When I emerge into a more peaceful state, the object comes to me, and I see it for what it is: a ‘scary thought.’ Then I realize, if I am aware of the thought and the accompanying fear, then the fear is not all that is present. Awareness is also present. And with that recognition, I can choose to function from the fear or from the awareness.”
He continued, “It’s like how, when we saw the earth from the moon for the first time, we could understand ourselves in ways that weren’t possible before. When I’m not so full of the hope of expectation, I can see more of the picture. I see opportunities that I missed before. This is not some passive, helpless state or a vacant lot in my mind. It is a pure openness that has inherent dynamism. It is infused with curiosity and discovery.”
What David was describing so eloquently is a subtler dimension to the idea of don’t wait, which I call non-waiting. It is the antidote to the trap of expectation—an open, receptive quality of mind. In non-waiting, we allow objects, experiences, states of mind, and hearts to unfold, to show themselves to us without our interference.
The difference between don’t wait and non-waiting is like the difference between detachment and non-attachment. Detachment implies distancing ourselves from a particular object or experience. It can feel cool, like we are withdrawing or pulling away. Non-attachment simply means not holding on to, not grasping, not getting entangled. There is no need for distancing oneself.
Similarly, non-waiting is relaxed and spacious, a way of allowing experience to come toward us without the need to reach out and grab it. We come to know our experience by revelation, not by wrestling meaning out of it or by manipulating it into being the way we want it to be, or by encumbering it with our previous knowing. Non-waiting is a quiet welcoming, more of an invitation than a demand. When we stop leaning into the next experience by hoping for a particular outcome, or leaning into the past by hoping we might somehow change it, only then are we free to know this moment completely.
Non-waiting offers us a new vantage point, a bit like Google Maps. In one moment, we may have a very narrow street view. We may be focusing on certain particulars, like the address of a house. Then we pull back to a more panoramic perspective, and we see how that one house is but a small dot in the city, the country, the hemisphere in which it resides. When we see the bigger picture, we can include more options.
Non-waiting is not patience. Patience implies expectation, waiting for the next moment, just doing it in a calmer way. The experience of non-waiting is more like continuous contact with reality. We are alert, awake, and fully alive. Whatever the experience—whether “good” or “bad,” whether we like or dislike it—we give our full attention to it, to what is happening right now.
In living, as in dying, when we hold hope apart from expectation, independent of attachment to outcome, we develop a wise connection with reality. We show up and participate directly in life’s unfolding. We engage in the journey instead of waiting to arrive at our destination.
Hope with an attitude of non-waiting gives rise to a timeless expansiveness, a joyful openness, a receptivity not contingent upon circumstances and conditions. It arises from an immediate connection with the benevolence of this human life. And, thanks to it, we are able to proceed with our lives without so much interference. Mature hope is a bit like Brahms’s “Lullaby,” a sweet reminder that helps us to relax and appreciate the potential for new life that always infuses the present moment.