Hope Floats
The 1998 chick flick was good, but it had no chance of outshining its title. Sandra Bullock made for an irresistible Birdee Puckett, the high school homecoming queen who moved away, married “well”, had an adorable daughter, got jilted, and then returned home only to fall in love with the local heartthrob, Justin Matisse, who was played by Harry Connick, Jr. (Ah, yes, of course he was.) It’s the prototype for Hallmark Christmas movies with a little more meat on its bones. Yet, it pales in comparison to what they called it. The real star of this show is the title. Two words that do what they sound like when you hook them together and say them out loud.
Hope floats.
Hope floats, if you give it a chance to. But it really has to have some room.
In a few days we will say goodbye to 2021 as we welcome in the new year with cautiously open arms. And we’ll find ourselves waving from on top of our pile of resolutions, like we always do, with an alluring canvas of white on the horizon. January one just feels so crisp and clean and….hopeful. Somehow our courage coagulates best on the first of the first of any given year.
This year’s pile of “to do’s” and “to do betters” seems a bit taller than usual, however, and more than a little more dense. There is just so much that needs to get done. We have vacations to go on and games to play and people to see and weight to lose and books to read and money to make. And we have wounds to heal and change to carve and crises to quell. The pile has grown enormous. Stuff has almost bled together, the important and the not. It’s really quite a challenge to figure out even where to begin.
The last couple of years have been tricky. Weirdly hard in context and in scope. With the pandemic stretching like the steps of the Eiffel Tower, people are worn down. And grumpy. And, generally, fairly low on the kind of hope that’s required for a rally. We’ve been zig-zagging for what feels like plenty long enough to get somewhere and yet, when we look up, everything above us looks just like everything below us. It’s groundhog day on steroids. There’s so much we have to get going on, and yet it feels like all we ever do is sweat while running in place. Maybe 2022 will be different. We hope. Most of the world is betting the house on it. At this point, to many, it feels like there is little left to lose.
The last couple of years have been tricky. Weirdly hard in context and in scope. With the pandemic stretching like the steps of the Eiffel Tower, people are worn down.
But that’s kind of part of the problem. We have convinced ourselves that everything is so bad.
I heard a psychologist on a morning show last week say that “people aren’t built for this kind of adversity”. And she wasn’t talking about the health care workers or our police force or even the families that have endured come-from-nowhere loss. She was talking about the general population, those of us who have to wear masks on planes and miss out on watching the ball drop in person and stick a Q-tip up our nose on occasion and put it in a tube. And it occurred to me that she must never have watched “Little House on the Prairie” when it took 3 days to walk to town.
Not built for this? Are we really so delusional to think that we can’t, even though we might not want? That’s one of the life-threatening side effects of hard things. Sometimes hope gets squashed like a carcass by all we wish we had.
When my kids were young and we were traveling, they used to ask, “How much longer???” Repeatedly. Over and over and over. The question sometimes popped up early, only minutes after we’d buckled them in their seats. And our stock answer was always, “Five more minutes.” Wherever we were, however far we were going: five more minutes. It always worked. Even when the kids got older and knew what we were doing, it worked. It forced a space in where there wasn’t one. We use it still when there is trudging to be done. “Five more minutes” we will say, and hope will float us onward.
It might be time, this New Year’s, to fidget around on the top of our respective resolution heaps. To just jostle things up a bit thereby creating some air holes where possibility can breathe. Birdee told her daughter, Bernice, what her mama had always told her: “Beginnings are scary, endings are usually sad, but it is the middle that counts the most. You need to remember that when you find yourself at the beginning. Just give hope a chance to float up.” Given the opportunity, it will.
Sherri Coale
P.S. New Year s resolutions are a thing…they’re just not everybody’s thing…