Helping hope along

Seventh day of Christmas and the last day of the year 🙂

While slowly getting ready to dress up and celebrate the transition to next year, I will write the last post of this year.

Today’s topic is suggested by Karina, who is the big sister of my oldest friend, and my chosen family 🙂

Interesting enough it reminded me of the great keynote by Stephan Kämper about luck – and helping luck along 🙂

You can always hope for something, but hoping is not always enough to make things happen.  Hope can be helped along by actions – big or small.

As I wrote about yesterday, we have been helping hope along throughout the ages by sacrificing so that the gods would grant us our wishes – in whatever forms those gods or deities were.

The hopes we have today are mostly not about the same things – though in some cases they are. Farmers hope for good weather and great crops; potential parents hope for fertility so they can have the children, they long for. And they help the hopes along. The farmers fertilize the crops, water them, weed, cut of branches of trees so the rest can grow even better fruits, look at weather forecasts etc etc. The potential parents may measure ovulation cycles, if they struggle to get pregnant, or they might get help from our medical systems (which in my part of the world to some extend is free).

We also have different hopes today: maybe we hope to find a new job, to win the lottery, to lose weight, to make that discovery in science that will make us famous, that the earth will become a better place.

All those hopes are great, and they will not happen unless we do something. We will never win the lottery if we don’t buy a ticket; we will not make a discovery unless we put in work; we will not make the world a better place unless we do something about it.

What does it take to make the world a better place?

Well that depends on your definition of a better place; just remember that it is okay to do small things as well 🙂

Recycling can help the environment, smiling at someone can help a lonely person, giving a lift can make someone’s life easier, knitting socks can help homeless people… There are plenty of options to make the world a better place if we take the actions.

Remember:

If we all do things that matter little to us and a lot to someone else, we can make the world a better place

Me at age 9

Happy new year to you and all your loved ones. Let us help our hopes along so they may come true.