I love opening up my email in the days which follow the monthly distribution of Ho‘ohana ‘Ōlelo, our SLC newsletter, for I hear from many of you who just want to say hello and give me a quick update, finding it easy to hit that “Reply” button.
In one of today’s messages, Ed wrote, “Merry Christmas to you & yours. Love your optimism & suggest it be added to the list as #13. With love and good cheer!”
Upon reading his message, my first thought was, “what a great thought! I would love to have optimism there too.” I clicked back to My Aloha List of Virtues, and what was the first one there? Hope, a virtue I believe we can think of as the older sister of optimism:
Hope. Hope is such a beautiful thing. It is an attitude about the best of possibility becoming real. Hope looks at all the good that is true about the present and assumes it will ho‘omau, be perpetuated into our future — and then some.
There is optimism in all the virtues, for optimism is a certainty that good will come, that there is always a “bright side” and “half-full” view on the horizon – always. Hope is optimism with the wisdom of age, and a confidence that there can be even more; there can be possibility which may not yet exist. Hope assumes that good is meant to be built upon, widened, added to, and stretched to the fullest capacity of abundance. Hope is a wisdom that gives credibility to imagination, for if something is to become real mustn’t we imagine it first?
[Flickr photo by Julie Prem Photography.]
Catch up with us: A new December Tradition: Twelve Aloha Virtues.
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