"If you don't have hope, you don't even feel like getting out of bed in the
morning," someone said to me recently.
How true.
We
need hope as much as we need air, water and food.
When
cancer strikes, hope plays a vital role, finding a healthy balance that
avoids both false optimism and pessimism.
Not to
badmouth optimism.
Hope supports a HEALTHY optimism, an
emotionally intelligent attitude that increases our power to take positive
action.
The
problem is FALSE optimism -- the head-in-the-sand kind that says
"ignorance is bliss" and tries to eliminate fear. False optimism leads to
unbalanced decision-making and collapses when reality shatters
illusion.
The opposite exreme is pessimism. Here, fear
balloons out of control, and a dark cloud of "gloom and doom" seems to
follow us everywhere. Pessimism leads to feelings of helplessness and
to premature "giving iup."
Hope guides us on a middle
path.
"This is the great paradox of true hope: Because
nothing is absolutely determined there is not only reason to fear but also
readon to hope," says Jerome Groopman, M.D., in The Anatomy of
Hope. "And so we must find ways to bridle fear and give greater rein
to hope."
Taking risks and dangers into account, hope
keeps fear within healthy bounds and finds the best way forward.
The results: endurance and courage.
Mark Twain
said,
"Courage is the mastery of fear, not the absence of fear."
With
hope as our guiding star, we can navigate the rough waters of cancer
and find the way to healing.
TIP: When fear feels
overwhelming, arrange to talk with someone you can trust to support
your hope. Meanwhile, take time for pleasant activities that help you
focus on the hear-and-now, rather than on a frightening imagined future.
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