Enough Hope to Laugh

Hope is when you can laugh more than you cry. They say that laughter is the best medicine, but I believe hope lets you have moments of that all-healing laughter. There was a transition to my grieving the loss of my husband when people would ask me how I was doing. At some point I was able to realize I had happy moments where I could laugh again.

The opposite of hope is despair. Despair is a natural feeling to have when your whole world gets turned upside down. I have a good friend who refers to her life as a snow globe and when something traumatic happens it’s as if someone picked up her world and shook it. Then, just as the flakes settle, there would seem to be something else that would shake it and turn up the calm blanket on the bottom of the globe. With hope, we see the shake ups as disturbing our world but know that there will be a peaceful rest when the dust settles.
The real milestone I reached in my personal global shakeup was when I reached the point where I realized I was laughing more than I was crying. Hope in a future that can be as good as the past and hope in today being better than yesterday is how we heal, grow and ultimately thrive.