Life is a hypocrite if I can’t dance the way it moves me.

 ~ Christopher Fry

They teach us many things in this small, bluish world we’ve come to love.

In school you learn the Who, the Where and When. The How, you learn later from life. The Why escapes you for the most part. And when you finally get an idea, you realize it’s just another room in a house that’s no longer yours. Your life, an enchanted city with too many buildings. What was your name, again?

But I’m more interested in the unlikely What—that terrifying pulse under your skin, the silent breath that whispers “everything is” or “anything can be”. The only constant.

There’s one motor, one murmur common to all ways of life; no less necessary than oxygen and no more optimistic than sunshine. Some call it hope.

As skeletal and central as hope seems to be—the blueprint of life, in this case—it’s a painful paradox to find armed guards at the doors of everything you dare to dream or do.

When you have to justify and defend imagination but you don’t need to excuse yourself from apathy or ignorance, there’s something wrong with the world; with any world.

There are all kinds of antidotes to hope. They sell them at pharmacies; at supermarkets, at every corner of every street, on your TV screen, in magazines… They even sell them in your head—that army of Nos always defending its territory.

Hush. Don’t dare to hope out loud. It’s too good to be true. It’s improbable, absurd, ridiculous…  How arrogant of you to want it all.

We’ve accidentally turned happiness into a cliché and cynicism into a virtue. If Yes is a gate that each of us has to cross through in order to exist, why is it not-recommended to open it?

What came first, the door or the key?

Hey You, be careful what you ask for…

            You might just get it.

The rules of hope are simple: nothing real can be utterly destroyed, and nothing unreal can be threatened. If the longing in us is such a dangerous business that someone or something is constantly trying to silence it, maybe it’s because it leads to a real map of life’s treasures—the kind of map only the heart can read.

Possibility is what makes your cells multiply and the idea of you, turn into fact.

As Gay Hendricks so brilliantly put it:  “We are good times waiting to happen.”

I’d add that we’re already happening.

I think life is synonymous with hope. And if we shouldn’t unplug ourselves from it, then we might as well stop resisting it.

The lights are always on, but you should check your eyes, says the Hope doctor. If open, they might see the things they want; and want the things they need; and dare to ask out loud without disliking the sound of your own voice… and to receive.

Because what if life is (essentially) dreaming; and you and I, just improbable dreams come true?

So, hurry up, Heart and repeat with me. Let’s memorize these lines before they send the guards:

Hope is the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul.
And sings the tune without the words.
And never stops at all.

 ~ Emily Dickinson