Alive - by Dave Smith

Archbishop Desmond Tutu: ‘Hope is being able to see that there is
light despite all of the darkness.’
Lord Alfred Tennyson: ‘Hope smiles from the threshold of the year
to come, whispering “It will be happier.”’ 1
Put simply, hope is essential for us being and feeling fully alive. But,
like the word ‘love’, there are different ways that the word ‘hope’ is
understood and used.
Firstly, there is a vague hope, typified in rather bland statements
such: ‘I hope it doesn’t rain today’; ‘I hope Man City keep on winning
titles!’; ‘I hope the economy will recover.’
Secondly, there’s what could be called optimistic hope, which is
characterised by a generally positive view of life and the future. On
one level, there’s nothing wrong with having a positive outlook on life.
The problem, though, is when it clouds our judgment about the reality
of situations, even giving a false sense of hope.
The danger of this kind of optimism, or wishful thinking, was brought
home to me many years ago when reading Jim Collins’ business
book, Good to Great. In one chapter Collins talks about ‘The
Stockdale Paradox’. The name refers to Admiral Jim Stockdale, who
was the highest-ranking United States military officer in the ‘Hanoi
Hilton’ prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War.
Tortured over 20 times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965
to 1973, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner’s rights, no
set release date and no certainty as to whether he would even
survive to see his family again. Stockdale recounted: ‘I never doubted
not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end
and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in
retrospect, I would not trade.’ Yet whereas he survived, there was a