Hope.

Small but mighty little ‘hope’. The one four-letter word that has been the indisputable backbone of human resilience since time began.

In just four letters, it beautifully encapsulates our ability to envision a brighter future and a better outcome, even when the present seems heartbreakingly bleak. It's the word that whispers "keep going, you’re alright" when everything else screams "it’s over” or “just give up".

From Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream, to the latest start-up pitch in a Shoreditch coffee shop, to waiting for the phone to ring and the war to end, hope fuels us with its implied possibilities. It’s what drives us forward. 

When I was growing up, in a small town in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, my dad use to reprimand us whenever we dared to start a sentence with I hope…. - “hope in your one hand, and poop in your other hand” he would say “and see which hand holds the most!’ This was his well-meaning but ill-tempered way to try and prepare his three daughters for what he could only assume would be a less-than-easy life. This still makes me smile.

It ended up having the exact opposite effect. In stead of giving up hope, and parting ways very early on and very cynically with any possibility of a more favourable outcome to things, it made me deeply determined to keep hoping above all else. In fact, to always hope so relentlessly and so generously that there will alway be more hope in every situation, that no hope. (and I never did poop in my hand!)

In Man’s Search for Meaning, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl expresses the life-saving necessity of hope. He explains how, between 25 December 1944 and 1 January 1945 the camp experienced “a death rate beyond all previous experience”, and not because of the cold or lack of food or the horrid conditions, but because “the majority of prisoners had lived in the naive hope that they would be home again by Christmas”. With this hope unmet, prisoners had no reason to continue on. When the mind lets go, so does the body.

Aristotle may have once said that hope is merely ‘a waking dream’, while Plato called it a ‘pleasure’ - we can’ take for granted that hope is at the heart of every single survivor story, every single global achievement and most of the small and bigger decisions we make every single day. Because we hope for better, we hope against all hope, and we hope above all else.