AUDACIOUSLY SPREADING HOPE THROUGH STORY part 6

A single story can be hopeful or not-so-hopeful. It all depends on where you put the emphasis.

Part 1
Create hope in a story you tell by making sure you know in your heart where the hope is. Feel it first.

Part 2
Create hope by playing with time. Make the time span as long as it needs to be.

Part 3
Create hope in one context by telling a hopeful story about another.

Part 4
Create hope in stories by talking about hope.

part 5
Create hope in stories by including symbols.

6) Create hope with heroes.

Rhonda Leigh Jones: The success of the Harry Potter series can be attributed to its masterful use of the hero's quest, which readers like because it gives them hope.

A hero—artfully placed in a story--is a human symbol of hope. As Jones observes, the hero’s role is implicitly hopeful. A hero does remarkable things. A hero transforms, overcomes, exceeds, prevails through adversity. A story with a solid hero captures us. It inspires us. It compels us to believe in the power of humanity—to entertain the notion that any person might, given a chance, be a hero.
A hero’s hope-enhancing power is considerable, and it can be increased by explicitly linking that hero with hope. A simple Internet search linking hope and heroes will show you that writers are highlighting the connection in a variety of genres. One good example appears in an article about cyclist Lance Armstrong. The Hero Of Hope where Dan Wetzel writes: “”But battling the Alps, the time trials and the snippy French press was really nothing compared to being the hero of hope to all of those chemotherapy patients.
Lance Armstrong is the most important athlete of our generation for all of that.
"I want you all to know that I intend to beat this disease," said Armstrong on Oct. 8, 1996, back when such talk was not likely to be taken seriously.
Armstrong was the ninth-ranked cyclist in the world at the time, a fringe player in a fringe sport in America, all of which makes his impact today seem
so unlikely. He had testicular cancer, which had spread to his abdomen and lungs, which meant his boasts of beating it seemed based primarily on false
hope.
"Further," he said, "I intend to ride again as a professional cyclist."
What has transpired since is so incredible, so moving, so miraculous, so important that it doesn't seem possible.
Armstrong didn't just beat cancer, he showed thousands of others how to do it, raised millions to ensure more would, and changed the entire way the disease
is viewed.
Ten years ago, who didn't know someone lost to cancer? Today who doesn't know someone who has beaten it? Today when the diagnosis comes in, as gut-wrenching
and horrifically frightening as it is, it isn't what it once was. It isn't a death sentence. Today, there is a chance.
Armstrong, with his Texas tenacity, with his American drive, hammered the disease and then returned to cycling and crushed all comers, winning the Tour
just 18 months after a press conference many people figured would signal his death.””
We see in this excerpt that Wetzel is writing not only about Armstrong, but also about hope, the transition from false hope to hope itself, from the impossible to the possible. Wetzel has formed a story about a hero and made it a story about hope.

AUDACIOUSLY SPREADING HOPE THROUGH STORY part 5

A single story can be hopeful or not-so-hopeful. It all depends on where you put the emphasis.

Part 1
Create hope in a story you tell by making sure you know in your heart where the hope is. Feel it first.

Part 2
Create hope by playing with time. Make the time span as long as it needs to be.

Part 3
Create hope in one context by telling a hopeful story about another.

Part 4
Create hope in stories by talking about hope.

5) Create hope in stories by including symbols.

Sherry Turkle: objects carry both ideas and passions. In our
relations to things, thought and feeling are inseparable.

Is there anything that makes a story more memorable, more compelling, more hopeful than a clearly identified symbol of hope? People give meanings to symbols and objects. They recall them time and time again. Any object can be identified as a symbol of hope. A hope symbol evokes the feeling of hope. By association it becomes linked to hope. There are some common hope symbols—angels, candles, butterflies and the like, but any object can be identified as a symbol of hope. All you have to do is mention the object and refer explicitly to hope at the same time. If you want to explain it clearly you can. If the hope symbol appears more than once in the story all the better.

AUDACIOUSLY SPREADING HOPE THROUGH STORY Part 4

A single story can be hopeful or not-so-hopeful. It all depends on where you put the emphasis.

Part 1
Create hope in a story you tell by making sure you know in your heart where the hope is. Feel it first.

Part 2
Create hope by playing with time. Make the time span as long as it needs to be.

Part 3
Create hope in one context by telling a hopeful story about another.

4) Create hope in stories by talking about hope.

Jaklin Eliott and Ian Olver: The multiple employment of hope suggests that the term cannot be defined simply as an entity to be operationalized and measured but can accommodate a plethora of meanings.

It may seem incredibly, ridiculously simple, but one of the easiest ways to give emphasis to hope in any story is to mention hope directly. Fortunately for us, hope gives us words in abundance. It is both a noun and a verb. We have hope, we hope for things. It is also a word with a number of derivatives—hoped, hoping, hopeless, hopeful, etc. C.R. Snyder, a prominent hope specialist in the world of academic hope studies, writes about high hopers and low hopers. Here in Edmonton at the Hope Foundation of Alberta, a centre for hope studies, I tend to speak of our circle of interested researchers as old hopeys.
Each of hope’s derivatives is just as helpful in the task of emphasis-giving as the root word itself. We can talk about hope in terms of quantity, no hope, lots of hope. We can mention hope in conjunction with acts, with events, with symbols--the thing that gave us hope.
Here in our counselling program, I have found that you can get anybody to talk to you about hope when you ask a question that mentions it. When I ask people to tell me their hopes, they willingly give answers that begin with I hope. When I ask them to tell me about a person who gives them hope, they tell me about a person who gives them hope and they describe that person in relation to hope. This practice also serves me well in the creation of stories.
It is not difficult to give emphasis to hope in a story if you ask yourself hope-related questions about the characters and then take the time to answer them. Let us think of a few familiar fairy tales. What was Jack hoping for when he planted the beans that grew into a beanstock? What were the three pigs hoping for when they built their houses? When did Hansel and Gretel feel the ultimate hopelessness? At what points did they hope for things? When youname hope’s role in a story, when you mention it in any form, talk about it, play with it, it will help you adjust the emphasis.

ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP ...

Kitty on the first day: I see they’re packing up the camping gear. I hope that doesn’t mean I’ll be staying with you!

Kitty on the second day: Well, perhaps, since they didn’t make it home last night, I’ll let you put food in my dish.

Kitty on the third day: I’ve been thinking that maybe you’d like to see more of me.

Kitty on the fourth day: Just behind the left ear, please. Ahhh! A little toward the neck. Now you’re getting the idea! I really think that having me around is doing you quite a lot of good.

Me to Kitty: Doesn’t it give you hope to know that in less than a week your worst nightmare can become your best friend?

AUDACIOUSLY SPREADING HOPE THROUGH STORY: part 3

A single story can be hopeful or not-so-hopeful. It all depends on where you put the emphasis.

Part 1
Create hope in a story you tell by making sure you know in your heart where the hope is. Feel it first.

Part 2
Create hope by playing with time. Make the time span as long as it needs to be.

3) Create hope in one context by telling a hopeful story about another.

W. F. Lynch: Hope is “the fundamental knowledge and feeling that there is a way out of difficulty, that things can work out ...”
In Part 2 of this series we referred to the victory speech delivered by Barack Obama on November 4, 2008, showing how he sought to inspire hope by telling his listeners a story of American history and triumph spanning a period of more than 150 years. By using a long time span, he was able to show resolution of certain issues, thus raising hope that current issues could be resolved. Now we turn to the issue of context, closely related to the idea of time and ask: Can a hopeful story about one thing give us hope for another?
Hopeful stories capture our imagination and attention. Have you ever stopped to wonder why romantic comedies have remained popular since Shakespeare’s time? It’s certainly not because we don’t know the ending. In fact, if we know a story is described as romantic comedy, we can predict with reasonable accuracy very near the beginning which of the characters will be coupled at the end. We attend to these stories because we like them. We like them because they give us hope.
Our work in counselling psychology at the Hope Foundation of Alberta, a centre for hope studies, is rooted in the belief that hope generated in one story can inspire hope in a context that has little to do with the hopeful story that is being told. To put it another way, we get hope from stories that have hope in them and we carry the hope over to other stories. The hope we carry over generates a set of possibilities for how the new story might end. In the work of counselling, this theory is important when working with people who have little hope. It means that we can use stories to generate hope for them, a hope that might possibly change their actions.
This work has taught me that it is important for me to have a large repertoire of hopeful stories—stories that give me hope. My repertoire of stories has become quite diverse, featuring big stories, small stories, stories about me, stories about others, folk tales and new stories. All of them have a place in my heart.
Some of these stories can be told at a crucial moment to people whose hope is seriously undermined by depression or seemingly unsolvable problems. The context does not necessarily have to be a good match for the person’s problems and circumstances. It’s the emphasis that counts, a hopeful emphasis. People change. Things exceed our expectations. Things surprise us. Though we may not see it in our own picture, stories can inspire us to imagine that there just might be a way out of difficulty. Things might possibly work out. We know that romantic comedies aren’t about us. They aren’t meant to teach us a lesson. Yet they still give us hope, and that matters.

NEXT YEAR IN THE SUMMER

I’ll spend more time in the yard next summer
Tending the flowers
Lounging on the veranda
Unless, by chance...

May is busy or June is cold
Or thunderstorms blow in when I am available,
Or too many loved-ones decide to get married,
Or I am chosen to present in Los Angeles
Or the State of Delaware offers a contract
Or all of these things happen
Or something completely different happens,
In which case...

I’ll plan to spend more time in the yard the following year.

THE CHOCOLATE PARADIGM

Lawrence: (Holding a new box of chocolates hand-made in California) There’s a chocolate in this box I hate.
Dad: Oh. Which one is it?
Lawrence: (eating a chocolate) I don’t know. I haven’t found it yet.
Mom: Even in the presence of doubt, and possibly failure we continue to try, hoping for the best.

AUDACIOUSLY SPREADING HOPE THROUGH STORY part 2

A single story can be hopeful or not-so-hopeful. It all depends on where you put the emphasis.

1) Create hope in a story you tell by making sure you know in your heart where the hope is. Feel it first.

2) Create hope by playing with time. Make the time span as long as it needs to be.

Ronna Jevne: “Hope is grounded in the past, focussed on the future and experienced in the present. It enables people to envision a future in which they are willing to participate.”

How can we structure a story about the past that will cause us to feel hope for the future? As we saw in Part 1

Part 1 of this series, stories don’t always make us or others hopeful the first time we tell them. We have to tinker a bit. One way of creating hope in a story is to play with time. We can make the time span as long as it needs to be. It is, after all, the teller who ultimately chooses the earliest and latest points of reference for any story.
On the night of November 4, 2008, newley elected US president Barack Obama gave a victory speech that was, by its design, deliberately hopeful. Its theme was “Yes We Can” and its message was: “We know we can because we have done it in the past.” In order to allow maximum space for hope, Obama chose a main character for his story who had just voted at the age of 106. He could then tell a story of America’s achievements during her long life. And then, because she was of African-American descent, and because he wanted to show that Americans had overcome slavery, he overcame an obvious limitation by stating that she was born just one generation after slavery. That was the only mention of slavery. But by including that single reference, he had made a long story short, and he had made it hopeful.
A few years ago I set out to create a story about women with breast cancer. I wanted to show how they had overcome a code of secrecy and learned to speak for themselves. Early versions of the story began in the 1970’s when women first began to speak publicly on the topic. The version I tell now begins in the present then cycles rapidly backward with short vignettes all the way back to the time of Hipocrates. The story of how women have changed in the past 30 years has more impact when it also shows that women did not speak for thousands of years, even though men spoke on the topic with various theories. One of the underlying themes is that things stayed the same for a very long time, and then, when they began to change, they changed a lot in a short time.

AUDACIOUSLY SPREADING HOPE THROUGH STORY: PART 1

Any given story can be hopeful or not-so-hopeful. It all depends on where you put the emphasis. For the past fifteen years I have experimented with stories, reflected on hope, read books, listened to stories, told stories, and tried to figure out what makes a story into a hopeful story. In this series, I will share some of the things I have learned along the way. I welcome comments and observations from readers.

1) Create hope in a story you tell by making sure you know in your heart where the hope is. Feel it first.

Like so many important lessons of life, I learned this one the hard way. Of course I have always known that hope, among other things, is an emotion. It’s something we feel. When we say, “There is no hope,” it isn’t because we’ve searched the world in every corner and found no evidence of hope. What we really mean is, “I do not feel any hope.”
Hope is a positive complex emotion, a little like joy, a little like excitement, a good feeling with doubt and uncertainty nipping at its edges. It comes to us from events, from points of view, from successes, from people in our lives. Stories are a major source of hope.
I have often heard and read stories that gave me hope. As a young teen-ager I lay on my bed on bright June evenings sniffling my way through Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. What a sad book it was, a story of racism and bullying and systemic indifference to injustice. And yet, at the end of that story, I felt hopeful. I believed that things could change! This month, noting the 50th anniversary celebrations of the publication of that book, I see that millions of others were similarly affected. Writing at a time when the injustices she exposed were still in full flower, Harper Lee knew how to put the hope into a story. I, unfortunately, am not Harper Lee.
Back in 2005 my dying mother was blundering her way through the corridors of palliative care. I was spending a lot of time with her there, experiencing the little pleasures, the big heartbreaks, the nagging frustrations. At the same time I was working in my daily routine, and presentation requests from palliative care organizations were coming to the Hope Foundation. In any year I would have responded knowledgeably to such requests, but in 2005 I felt truly engaged. I knew the situation from the patient’s daughter’s perspective and my rock solid hope content was filtered through my personal experience. I presented with passion, but not, unfortunately, with hope.
At the end of one such session I was approached by a sad and sincere doctor. “What could we do to make things better for your mother?” he asked. To my horror I found that I had no answer. And that’s when I discovered that I did not see the hope in my own stories. I had been talking about the impersonal approach of the health system. My talk, loaded with hope content and ostensibly about hope, was of limited use to these people working in the health system because it did not give them hope. When people hire a hope specialist to give them a talk, they are looking for hope. I had failed to deliver.
I was about to be re-tested. Another talk was scheduled for a different group two months hence. I would have like to withdraw, but the conference program had long ago been distributed. By the time the date arrived, my mother had died. I vowed not to make the same mistake again.
A hopeful story is, as I had often said in classes, not necessarily a story with a happy ending. It is, rather, a story where somebody changes, or something exceeds expectations, or something surprising happens. I was shocked to find that the stories I had been telling in presentations contained very little of this. Returning to the events leading up to and following my mother's death, I went back to my hope knowledge and began asking myself some questions. Who changed? What occurrences exceeded my expectations? What surprised me?
There were an astonishing number of answers. My mother changed. My father changed. I changed. The hospital staff exceeded my expectations. Many things surprised me. A treasure trove of hopeful stories were buried here. Among others, there was the story of how my father learned to grow vegetables and how my mother talked herself into welcoming the move to the palliative care suite. There was the story of how a hospital cutback that closed the nursery created the most wonderful palliative care apartment. There was the story of the nurse who brought lip balm and the one who told Mom comforting stories about the death of other patients. There was the story of the nurse who held my mother in the middle of the night and whispered to us that maybe it was time. And then there was the story of the hope-opotamus, the tiny stuffed animal with the power to command staff in three different hospitals and make them want to follow his lead. When I pulled together these stories, I knew where the hope was, and I knew then how to shape the stories of that painful time so that they would be hopeful to me, and also hopeful to others.

WEDDING HANGOVER

Ruth and Derek packed for Ontario
Taking the things that newlyweds need,
Furniture, wedding gifts, kitchen gadgets,
Love and best wishes from multiple corners.

Ruth and Derek packed for Ontario
Leaving for us what they could not take.
Random papers and lockless keys,
Contact info no longer connectible
Bottles and cans redeemable for cash,
Bamboo plant and one small suitcase,
Half-tubs of cookie dough, frozen berries,
Condiments and breast of chicken,
Livestock marker and picture frame
Candle lighters and flammable fluid,
Drying flowers and table adornments,
Toilet brush and Liquid Plumber,
Laundry soap and fabric softener,
Furniture polish and window cleaner,
Dishwashing liquid, dishwasher detergent

Ruth and Derek live in Ontario
Building a life to last a lifetime.
And if in their absence we find ourselves lonely
Perhaps there is no need to fuss or to worry.
We can bring them close in the simplest of acts,
With email or telephone, story or photograph,
Dinner and candles and washing up after,
Laundry and cleaning in every room.
Far away by kilometre measure,
And yet, surprisingly near.

CAN WE DO IT?

A young environmental advocate attended my hopeful storytelling workshop at the NSN conference in Los Angeles. For her it was a question of how to keep hope alive for people trying to combat climate change in a world where so many people don’t want to hear the warnings. We had come to L.A. from Philadelphia where we had visited Elfreth’s Alley
Elfreth’s Alley is a street of houses that have been continuously occupied for nearly 300 years! And It makes me wonder if we might be under-estimating our human potential. Three hundred years ago we already knew how to build structures that would be fit for habitation in the 21st century. Given all that we have learned since then, can it really be beyond our grasp to create a sustainable world?