How Hope Beats Mindfulness When Times Are Tough

“hope is the will to hold on to our values in the face of difficulty” — then, so long as we can keep rising to that spiritual challenge, there will always be hope.

This is how we should approach life’s hardships, finding possibility where we can: the prospect of flourishing despite infirmity, of finding one’s way through loneliness, failure, grief, confronting the injustice and absurdity of the world. The question is not whether we should hope, but what we should hope for.

Both kinds of optimism alert individuals to fresh opportunities and to the resources needed to pursue goals. Where pessimists may avoid problems, optimists cope and solve. They are specially productive because optimists are more likely to reach out for help, to collaborate and trust others. That gives them more capacity and resilience than they cou

To give up hope, by contrast, is to reinhabit the power that you actually have. At that point, Jensen goes on, ‘we no longer have to “hope” at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive … When we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself,