ON BEING INTERVIEWED ABOUT HOPE

For as long as there has been a Hope Foundation, there has been a relationship with the media. Considering what a small organization we are, it is gratifying that reporters have always been interested in the Hope Foundation. Publicity is good for the field of hope studies, and it is good for our programs. It helps us raise money. It attracts the attention of people who could use our help. And then there is the downside. To put it simply, being interviewed about hope tends to be a very stressful experience.
They say there is nothing quite as predictable as change. It’s a point I might have argued with in the past. I would have said, “Oh yeah? The experience of being interviewed never changes.” For that is how it seemed to me. But even that is changing.
Reporters just aren’t doing it the way they used to. Out in search of an informed comment on the topic of hope, they used to launch conversations on a largely predictable platform. The reporter would say something like, “How can you study something as intangible as hope?”
That, I learned, after many false starts, was the exact point where the conversation I had hoped to have would start to go off the rails. The conversation I hoped to have would make the point that hope is important because hope influences action. But instead of having that conversation, I would find myself in a sparring match. Boiled down to the basics, it would go something like this.
Reporter: “Hope is intangible.”
Me: “No it’s not.”
Reporter: “Yes it is.”
Me: “Really, it’s not.”
Reporter: “Give me some facts to prove that it’s not.”
And there I’d be, with nothing to say. Never mind that I was sitting not fifty feet from a whole library of hope research. Every fact I ever knew would vanish into thin air.
“Tell me,” the reporter would say softly, wanting to fill the silence, “tell me about one person whose life was saved by hope.”
And there I’d be, sitting in a roomful of confidential files, searching frantically for the name of somebody who would be willing to talk to this reporter. It’s hard to find people who want to talk to reporters.
Lacking a person whose life had been saved by hope, the reporter would have to settle for a conversation with me. We would have a talk, though rarely the one I had been hoping for. The conversation I had hoped for would have given me time to say that hope increases the likelihood that we will take an action that will lead us to something we want. It expands the repertoire of things we are willing to try. It improves the chance that we will be willing to try something else when something we attempt is less than rewarding. People are more flexible, more daring, more resilient when they are guided by hope. These are simple concepts, the rules for my life and work. But somehow they never came out quite that clearly.
Now things are changing. More to the point, current circumstances are changing the way reporters approach the topic of hope. They used to approach it gingerly, distantly, technically, the way the medical research approached it. Hope was associated with the lack of cures for scary things like cancer, or learning to use a wheelchair if you lost your legs in a bomb blast. To complicate things further, hope doesn’t mean much to you until you apply it to the context of your own life. This would cause a problem because most reporters are expected to write about things other than themselves.
What’s different now is that we—reporters and people being interviewed--have more in common than we used to. All of us—even the most positive thinkers, even those with giraffe necks buried ten feet deep in sand—yes all of us are living together in the fear and uncertainty brought upon us by the economic meltdown. This, I think, is the circumstance that is bringing about the change in the way reporters interview about hope. Hope—when you boil it down to the essentials—is not the least bit intangible. Above all else it is a feeling, a feeling that gets a lot more tangible when you try to summon it in the face of real human fear and uncertainty. These days we’re all facing the same fear and uncertainty. Like cancer patients at the doctor’s office we are turning to experts, to bankers and economists and government officials, turning to experts for a cure. It is terribly disorienting to find our experts falling to their knees, humbled to admit that they don’t know how to fix it. No wonder so many of us feel the need for hope and go in search of it.
These days reporters start conversations from a different platform. Hope is no longer intangible to them. What’s more, the conversation can be personally felt by the reporter even if it isn’t specifically about the reporter. It can be about any of us or all of us. It can begin with the understanding that hope is both tangible and important. It can go on from there.