do your “hopework”

Welcome to Tuesdays with Chel.

Each week Chel Micheline of gingerblue dot com offers her perspectives on our Bliss Habits. Please enjoy the wisdom and clarity she offers.

“Each person has an ideal, a hope, a dream which represents the soul. We must give to it the warmth of love, the light of understanding and the essence of encouragement.”
– Colby Dorr Dam

“The first step was simple: it was to believe in belief itself. I had just taken that step. At long last I understood. I had belief. I did not know, or for the moment care, what exactly it was I had to believe in. I only knew that belief in something was the first step away from believing in nothing… I believed in belief.”
– Paul Torday

Hope is an interesting Bliss Habit for me. I consider myself a bit of a cautious person. Hope seems like something that’s more on the side of “abandon”, something that might tempt fate a bit. It’s almost a scary thing, to have hope. It’s sort of like throwing a piece of your heart into the wind and not having any influence on where it will land. It can even *hurt*, sometimes, to have hope.

But a few months ago, when I was taking a class on spirituality and well-being, it became very apparent that hope is an essential element to well-being. It came up over and over and over again, and I couldn’t ignore it. I realized that even if hope is not completely natural and free-flowing for me, it’s still very important.

So then I started wondering how to approach this. I mean, how does a person cultivate a “hopeful” nature if it’s not ingrained in them?

The answer to “how do I learn to…?” is usually pretty straightforward: practice.

Any time we do something, think something, feel something, explore something, etc. we build a little connection called a neural pathway in our brains. It’s a PHYSICAL, literal connection that forms inside our neurological systems. And the more we do it, the stronger those connections grow. If we do it enough, those connections start firing on their own. Bottom line: no matter what we are practicing, and even if that “practice” feels uncomfortable or deeply forced, it’s still having a good impact on our brains.

It’s kinda like when we were a kid and had homework. The assignments may have been fluff, and we may have never used that geometric proof again (at least *I* have never had to prove a triangle since high school), but while you were hunched over all those worksheets and all that tiny, endless type in your giant history book, neural pathways were forming.

But how do we do that with hope? How do we practice being hopeful? After thinking about it a lot over the last few months, and trying a bunch of different things, here’s my suggestion:

Give yourself some “hopework”. You read it right: “hopework”. And yes, it’s totally meant to be a play on words, stemming from “homework”.

“Hopework” is *just* like homework. It’s a little something that we do every day that will bring us a little closer to a dream, or even just a positive outcome to a certain situation in life.  “Hopework time”, then, is a little time that is set aside every day when we give ourselves the permission to gently dip our toes into the scary waters of hopefulness and see what happens.

Here’s my particular situation: for years I have hoped that my artwork might have an online presence, a place where I have little galleries and regularly post about what I am working on. I mean, I have a personal website, and from time to time I’ll post my work on community websites, but I’ve never just felt comfortable putting myself out there, 100%. I didn’t feel like my artwork was good enough to warrant a website or an Etsy or a Facebook page specifically for it.

But I still had a little bit of HOPE that someone might notice it and enjoy it. They might see my paintings on my blog, or see my Flickr posts, or poke through my albums on Facebook and say “hey, wow, I like this painting!”

So I explored that little morsel of hope, the one that I kept mostly locked away. I called it practicality, but really it was fear. I was scared of doing the work and investing the heart and having no response. I’m still scared of that. But I decided that I wanted to go ahead and do the “hopework” anyway. Even if it flopped, I’d still be practicing feeling more hopeful and be building those connections in my brain, right? It’d probably come in handy in the future.

So my “hopework” these last few weeks has been to work steadily on building a little bit of an online presence for my art. Every single day I sit down and do something meaningful that brings me closer to my goal. Some days I get a lot done- I make more jewelry, I take a ton of photos, I write copy for the website, and I make a meaningful connection. And some days I get very little done- just a minor spelling correction on an Etsy listing, a clean-up of the “ART” folder on my harddrive, or a quick upload to Flickr.  Some days the only thing I get done is making a to-do list.

But I’m starting to realize that it all counts. Every second of it. By giving myself the permission to spend time every day working towards my goal, by investing time and energy and *heart* into this process, I am building up hope. I am allowing myself to feel like it just *may* work out, even though that scares the living hell out of me.

So, how does someone approach a “hopework” practice? I have to admit, it can be daunting to start. There’s a few ways of approaching it- you can portion out daily practices, assignments, tasks, or goals, or you can play it by ear and see what comes.

The only thing that matters is that you commit to the daily practice of “hopework” and attend to it every day, or as close to every day as you can. Because like homework, if you blow off your “hopework” assignments, they *will* pile up and overwhelm you.

Just take it one second at a time, one neural connection at a time. And remember, it’s worth it.

YOU’RE worth it. I promise you this.

 

Don’t forget to enter the Bliss Habits “Speaking of Hope” charity giveaway now underway!  You could win $250 dollars for your favorite charity!!