Where Do You Find Your Hope?

When the world is turned upside down by illness……

      Where do you find your hope?

When there are shortages of supplies at the grocery store…..

       Where do you find your hope?

When the world is spinning, and there is hatred and violence in the world…..

       Where do you find your hope? 

The first draft of this blog post was much angrier than I hope this one will be. In the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic I haven’t been personally worried or anxious. Which, if you know my journey with anxiety and panic attacks, is an unusual response. I have been angry.  I’m not a typically angry person. I often don’t see much value or use in the anger emotion. It’s one emotion I feel sucks up too much space or energy in a person’s body. After a lot of therapy, I’ve started learning that it’s ok to be angry sometimes. It’s also ok to express anger if you don’t use it to hurt people. The more a person bottles up or stuffs an emotion, the more toxic it becomes to the bearer of that emotion. With the outbreak of the Coronavirus there has been mass levels of hysteria and anxiety. This mass hysteria has led to shortages of basic supplies like toilet paper, soap refills, hand sanitizer and canned goods. How all of this made me angry instead of anxious is because one of my jobs is working at a local grocery store. When you work in a customer service related job, you expect people to come in upon occasion and treat you poorly. The past 3 weeks have been these types of experiences on steroids for 8 hours a day, 2-4 times a week. And it’s made me angry and exhausted. (Not the best combination).

In contrast to my grocery store job, is my pilates instructor position. I have WONDERFUL clients. But those wonderful clients are worried. So I’m faced with a decision on how to hold space for their worry, and still provide a way for them to work on their fitness in a safe and healthy environment.

It is working with these very different work realities that I’ve been forced to decide how I want to respond to our current reality.

 Despite how we feel, We all have the ability to choose how to respond to the world around us. So my choice is hope. I choose hope  and peace because I know that I am doing all that I can to keep myself safe. I choose hope, because I refuse to give in to fear, anxiety, worry and hysteria. I know from personal experience that those emotions only take away my ability to take health action steps to keep myself healthy. I choose hope, because I realize that there is a God in Heaven who actually cares what happens to me even when everyone else thinks that he doesn’t exist. And finally, I choose hope because without hope, there is no reason to continue forward in life. And somehow, I think people around me need an extra boost of hope to be able to continue forward with their life.