I don't think hope is always obvious.
Sometimes hope is loud and innocent. It's buying a lottery ticket and imagining where you'd travel. It's checking the weather before a long weekend and crossing your fingers for sunshine. It's wishing your favourite team wins.
Those hopes are easy to admit because they don't cost much.
The harder hopes are the ones we pretend we don't have. The ones we've buried under phrases like "it is what it is" and "I've accepted it."
I've spent years telling myself I know exactly who my father is. I know what our relationship is and what it isn't.
And yet every once in a while, something happens that knocks the wind out of me.
Not because I expected anything. Because apparently, somewhere underneath all my logic and all my acceptance, I was still hoping.
Hoping for a different conversation. Hoping for a different choice. Hoping for a version of the relationship that has never really existed.
The same thing happens in friendships.
A friend tells you a story about someone who hurt them years ago. They insist they're over it. They've moved on. They've accepted who that person is.
Then an opportunity for reconciliation appears and suddenly the emotions are enormous.
Not because they're irrational. Because hope was still there.
Quiet. Hidden. Waiting.
I think some of our deepest pain comes from discovering hopes we didn't know we were carrying.
The hope that a parent will finally become the parent we needed. The hope that someone who hurt us will understand. The hope that an old wound can be repaired.
The hope that if we're patient enough, forgiving enough, understanding enough, things will somehow work out differently this time.
Those hopes are dangerous because they don't announce themselves. They sit quietly in the background until reality collides with them.
Then we're left wondering why we're so upset. Why this hurts so much. Why we can't just let it go.
For a long time, I treated those moments as evidence that I hadn't learned my lesson.
If I was disappointed, it meant I'd expected too much.
If I was hurt, it meant I'd forgotten who someone was.
If I was upset, it meant I was somehow back at square one.
But I don't think that's true anymore. Perhaps hope isn't a failure of acceptance. Maybe it's evidence of our humanity.
I don't think the goal is to stop hoping. We are wired for possibility. For connection. For redemption. We hope people will grow. We hope relationships can heal. We hope the people we love will surprise us.
Without hope, we'd become cynical. And cynicism isn't protection. It's just another kind of loss.
Maybe the real work is noticing where hope still lives. Being honest about the relationships and situations where we're quietly wishing for a different outcome.
Not so we can extinguish the hope. But so we're not blindsided by it.
Because hope isn't weakness. It's evidence that some part of us still believes things could be better.
The trick is learning how to carry that hope with open eyes. To acknowledge the risk without pretending it isn't there. To understand that disappointment doesn't always mean we were naïve.
Sometimes it simply means we cared.
And maybe that's the price of staying open to the possibility that people, and relationships, can still surprise us.
Talk soon,
Tara
CEO of Chaos & Co.