The Power of Hope

If you throw a mouse into a container in which there is only water it will swim for a certain period of time until it eventually gives up…floats…and drowns.

On the other hand, if you were to take the same mouse and place it into a container in which there was water, but also a piece of material in the water onto which the mouse believed it could pull itself to safety, it swims longer….much longer.

The difference, of course, isn’t just a piece of material. The difference is hope.

In the first scenario the mouse learns that it is helpless and hopeless and surrenders without much of a fight.

But the one who has hope keeps fighting because it believes that if it just keeps trying that it will eventually overcome the seemingly insurmountable obstacle.

Sadly, we live in a world that doesn’t instil much hope in us.

And that makes us want to quit.

It makes us want to quit on our training and nutrition programs.

It makes us want to quit on our relationships.

It makes us want to quit on our dreams.

But hope only disappears when you surrender it. When you cling to hope, like the mouse in the second example, you’ll keep swimming, and swimming, and swimming.

And the great thing about life is that is rarely ends with us not getting out of the container. Eventually, if we cling to hope long enough we get a foothold and we pull ourselves through the seemingly insurmountable.

But we have to keep swimming long enough to do it.

As Martin Luther King once said ““We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

I think he hit the nail right on the head.