The Anatomy of Hope

Why we believe and how it shapes our future

There is a phrase we often say in Farsi when we're discussing our troubles and the conversation leads to an existential crossroad: ‘omidvaar hastaam’, which translates to ‘I am hopeful.’

Hope is a construct that’s profoundly effective in helping us focus on the future. Sometimes it’s a choice, but often it’s the lifeline that empowers us to believe that things can change. Hope acts like a medicine, able to reach the shadowy places of our inner worlds and humanity’s collective consciousness to sustain a kind of warmth through the long winters of uncertainty and despair.

As our species has evolved, hope has become more present and a driver of change, innovation, and progress. We need hope to envision and plan for the future. We need hope to imagine a different reality, to bring our ideas to life, to commit to our relationships. We need hope when we fall ill and confront our mortality. And we need hope to invest in our communities and cities. We need hope like we need safety and security.

Hope is not a nice-to-have, it’s a must have. When we lose hope, we lose our connection to life—and sometimes to each other.

What is the element of hope? Is it blowing in the wind or grounded in something tangible? Is it fuelled by passion or does it find confidence in its ability to shape-shift? Perhaps it's a combination of these that has enabled it to exist through natural disasters and human-made catastrophes. It remains relentless, fed by an invisible collective determination to survive. 

Theory #1: We need hope to survive.

II

What exactly is hope? How do we cultivate it? And how does it inform our lives?

According to Brené Brown, hope is not just an emotion but a way of thinking and a learned behaviour. It involves the ability to stay focused on goals, navigate obstacles, and maintain the belief that one can influence their future positively.

When I examine what I’m hopeful about, I realize that it’s not ethereal, it is grounded in something real—either in the world or in my history. One may feel hopeful about becoming an internationally recognized artist because they know someone similar who has achieved that level of success, and another may be hopeful about making an income as an entrepreneur because they’ve done it before. Hope, in its purest form, is evidence-based and interdependent.

Theory #2: Hope is rooted in concrete proof that something can be achieved. 

III

Where does hope begin and end? What is our capacity to create and sustain hope? What happens when we run out of hope?

To understand hopefulness, we need to investigate hopelessness.

In a relationship, when we lose hope, it often leads to the relationship ending. We need to see evidence of change to remain hopeful. Because hope is not foolish, it is unconsciously calculated. We observe, witness, experience, reflect, analyze, process, understand, learn, adapt, try again and again and again.

When my mom and I discuss the potential of me becoming a mother, she reminds me that children give us hope. I don’t disagree, but why do they make us hopeful? Because they are conduits of change, bundles of possibility yet to be affected by life’s cruelties. They have the capacity, and the time, to become stewards of the future. This might indicate that our relationship to hope is partially informed by age and experience. A 20-year-old may have more hope than a 70-year-old because they’ve experienced less and have more time to form their opinions and change their minds.

Theory #3: Maintaining hope requires us to interrogate our deepest beliefs about ourselves, each other, and the world.

IV

While we say ‘I’m hopeful,’ we also say ‘I’ve lost hope.’ What does it mean to lose hope? Once lost, can it be restored?

Hope in ourselves might be easy, but what about hope in others? The more you move outside the circle of social intimacy, the scarcer hope seems to become. Trust and hope are intertwined.

In our work at RebuildTO, we often talk about how essential it is for residents to believe in a positive potential in order to want to invest long-term in a city and a community. How do we encourage people to care? Can we? How do we sustain that care? Can we care if we don’t feel hopeful about the future?

People don’t stay in jobs, cities, or relationships that feel hopeless. Cultivating and nurturing hope is one of our greatest challenges—individually and collectively.

Hope is not singular or linear, it’s complex and nuanced. These feel like different kinds of hope:

• I hope I...

• I hope you...

• I hope we...

Hope is both solid and projected. ‘I am hopeful’ is vastly different from ‘I hope I can....’ Being hopeful is much more powerful than hoping. One is a state, a position, a conviction, while the other is a projection, a possibility, a desire.

Understanding the essence of our hopefulness and hopelessness will help us get closer to the truth—because in our hopes, we reveal what we truly want, and what we believe is within reach. 

Theory #4: Hope is multidimensional. 

V

The past few years, I’ve established a relationship with hopelessness. I recognize it as an edge I will visit often given the state of our world, not because of who I am, but because I’m human and it is part of our condition to question the future. In a reality that normalizes genocide, organic hope has been hard to come by, so I’ve learned to plant seeds and nurture the garden myself. To go back out after every storm, take stock of what remains, and begin again. Through this practice, I’ve learned that hope can be cultivated, grown, and shared.

I’m finding that one can be hopeful and afraid, hopeful and skeptical, hopeful and uncertain. Hope is not a torch that needs to be carried from one end of the journey to the other without pause. It’s okay to stop, to question, to be utterly exhausted, to ask for help, and then to continue on.

One reason I feel so drawn to creativity and entrepreneurship is because hope is embedded in their DNA. No one would birth something if they weren’t hopeful about its potential. The creative process is full of hope—we could not go on without it. Things literally come to life because people believe, against all odds, that something remarkable is possible. But the journey is equally marked by hopelessness, adversity, rock bottom moments where the lines on the map begin to disappear. We lose our way, we find our way, and in between, we transform. 

Theory #5: Hopelessness is an essential part of hopefulness. Recognizing and embracing this duality is a spiritual practice. 

VI

When my parents left Iran and migrated across the world to build a new life, they had only a few suitcases, a thousand dollars in cash, and the hope that life would be better on the other side. This is the story of many refugees and immigrants—a story of believing and longing for something more. Whether they find it or not is another question, but what drives them is the desire for change. 

Without hope, the future looks bleak, reality fragments, and our sense of self begins to evaporate. If we can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, we lose the spark needed to continue, and that spark, no matter how small, is profound and necessary.

In a decade that often feels hopeless, I’m digging deep within to find slivers of potential that can be pieced together to create a way forward. The journey is long, and sometimes it feels like we are carrying bags filled with bricks. Whether these burdens are our own, our ancestors’, or the world’s, it is a heavy load to drag across time and space. I ground myself in the belief that we are still co-authors of this story—both our individual narratives and our collective unfolding.

If hope is a practice, it’s one we need to cultivate within ourselves and our communities. There are days when it feels like our humanity, or what’s left of it, is under attack. But we can preserve it, because hope fuels new visions, and new visions, collectively embodied and sustained, will define and build the next world.

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