Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (5 page)

This simple model works whatever your goals, age, or circumstances, whether you’re most concerned about your family, your business, your community, or your personal development. Every example and story in this book builds on this model. But the stories also remind us that life is anything but simple, that hope has many faces, and that it flourishes in unexpected places. They also remind us about one of the most striking qualities of hope: hopeful people spread hope to almost everyone they meet.

I can’t go a day without finding hope. Maybe I cast a wider net than I used to, looking everywhere now for people in hot pursuit of what’s next. Or maybe I surround myself with hopeful people, spending time around folks who are excited about the future.

Where do you find hope? Who is the most hopeful person in your life? Answering these questions and talking to the most hopeful person you know will help you firm up your own ideas about hope.

I find hope in abundance when I join my son Parrish at the playground. Watching the children play tells me a lot about hope. A child’s vision transforms a series of obstacles (tall ladders, hard-to-reach monkey bars, wobbly wooden bridges) into limitless opportunities and challenges. Goals become clear (“I am going to swing across all the monkey bars”), the plan develops (“I am going to climb the ladder, grab the bar, and swing from the first one to the second one”), excitement carries them forward, though sometimes they need support (“Can you help me up?”), and all the while confidence grows (“I think I can . . . Yeah, I did it!”).

But I learn most about hope as I watch hopeful people hold on to what matters in the darkest of times, and when they have major obstacles in their way. Rose Naughtin does this better than anyone I know. That’s why she wins my “Most Hopeful Person” award.

The daughter of one of my former coworkers at the University of
Kansas, Rose walked into my life when she was nine years old. My wife, Alli, and Rose’s mother became close friends, so I heard more and more about the beautiful little girl with the soulful blue eyes who would visit our offices and play with the toys on our desks.

Already famous in our town, Rose had undergone a heart transplant when she was only four years old. The community had rallied around her and her family, hosting fund-raisers for her treatment and checking in on her recovery. She had grown into a gentle, beloved child, with a special quality that even strangers felt. When you meet Rose, you can feel that she’s an old soul.

Rose’s family lived only two blocks from our house, and she enjoyed coming over to play with our miniature dachshund or just to hang out. At some point, Alli decided that Rose was her unofficial little sister. The spring before Rose was to begin junior high, she announced that she wanted her bedroom to feel more grown-up, and the two of them pored over paint chips on our dining room table, happily dreaming about Rose’s teenaged room.

A few months later on a class field trip, Rose became dizzy walking up a steep hill, sat down on a curb to rest, and fainted. One of her friends, who knew about the transplant, insisted that someone call her mother, who immediately took Rose to her cardiologist. A heart monitor turned up nothing wrong, but a biopsy told a different story: Rose’s heart tissues were inflamed. Rose’s transplant—the second heart of her twelve-year-old life—was failing.

That beautiful late spring was a scary time. A lot of us spent weeks fearing the worst, talking around possibilities that were too frightening to discuss head-on. Rose missed the end of the school year, her parents drove her everywhere, even to our house, and her energy went downhill fast. Finally, her family got the call that a heart was available, and within minutes they were in a medevac hospital, speeding toward Children’s Hospital in St. Louis.

Think of the difference between having a heart transplant at age four and again at age twelve. This time, family and the doctors prepared
Rose by explaining the procedure and giving her positive but realistic information about the future. When Rose was rolled into the operating room, she knew what she was in for and the risks involved. With the awareness of adolescence she felt both numbing fear and the strong pull of hope.

Fortunately, the surgery went fine, and Rose returned home to friends, family, and the room of her dreams—completely redecorated, and featuring a poster of her then-favorite band, the Ramones, autographed by Johnny Ramone himself. But despite another outpouring of community support, and the exhilaration of simply having survived, Rose became overwhelmed by the reality of the hard work ahead of her. The medications she needed to take in order to recover—heavy-duty painkillers and steroids—triggered serious side effects, including depression, mood swings, and weight gain. For the first time, Rose allowed herself to really cry. She now looks back on this period as “the emotionally darkest part of the experience.”

For solace, Rose looked to the future. She spent hours imagining how it would be to rejoin her friends, to walk down the halls of her junior high talking about normal things, tackling the new subjects she’d signed up for. But once she got back to school, another reality hit. Some of her old friends just didn’t know how to respond, and she felt separate from the other kids because nobody could understand what she’d been through.

“I was upset about a lot of things, but even then I knew it could be a lot worse,” Rose now says. “Being in the ICU of a children’s hospital, I’d seen people around me who were a lot worse off—sick kids, dying babies, and scared and sad families. It made me feel that my worldview was so different from other people my age—I had faced that something really bad can happen. How could I be the same after that?”

As her third heart gave her back her glow and vitality, Rose’s life returned to normal, but she still felt separated from other kids, because she was on a life course of immunosuppressant medication to ensure that her body wouldn’t reject her new heart.

For me, this is where the evidence of Rose’s hope really shines. Rose has to take this medicine three times a day. At first, her mother monitored her meds closely. But when Rose reached high school, her mother stopped reminding her to take them. This is an especially dangerous time for teens on life-sustaining medication of any kind. They want and need independence, but their anger about being different can lead them to “blow off” the long-term consequences of noncompliance.

Rose never took her future or her health for granted. “I initially used clocks to help me remember,” she recalls. “But now I don’t even need them any more. And in an eight-and a-half-year period, I’ve probably missed only four doses.” (By my calculations, that’s four out of more than
nine thousand
doses.) She’s also changed her perspective on her meds. “I no longer think of transplants when I take them,” she told me. “I look at things in terms of health.”

Today, Rose is going to college studying Hindi and working in the bakery of our town’s popular food co-op. She continues to be an active collaborator with her doctors and nurses. She is vegetarian. She walks everywhere. She is in charge of her life. She is also an advocate for Midwest Transplant Network, which raises money to support organ transplants, and for Gift of Life, which takes her to high schools to share her story and encourage students to discuss organ donation with their families.

When she looks into her future, Rose sees herself married with a family, living in a new city and working in some sort of public service. “I’m still not sure exactly what I’m going to do, but I know I like to make things happen,” she told me. And when she looks back at her second transplant, she says she still feels bad for that scared twelve-year-old she once was. “I want to comfort my past self and say, ‘Look ahead! Everything is going to be fine.’ ”

Rose puts her hope to the test every day to keep her health in check. What about you? Do you hope at will? I constructed a brief scale to measure your current level of hope. After you complete the hope scale as directed, either on this page or at
www.makinghopehappennow.com
, you can go online for help understanding your scores.

Directions:
Read each item carefully. Using the scale next to each item, ranging from Strongly Disagree (SD) to Strongly Agree (SA), please circle the number that best describes you.

Scoring

Questions 1–5:
On a range from 5 to 25, where did you score? This is your Hope score. If it is below 15, it will take hard work and much practice to raise that score. If you scored 16 to 20, your hope is an asset to you every day, but there are many strategies that can help you increase it. If you scored 21 or above, you are a high-hope person whose thinking about the future is an asset.

Questions 6–7:
This is your Readiness to Hope score, ranging from 2 to 10. The higher your score, the more you believe that your future is dominated by your past and present circumstances, and the less room you have for hope. Learn to expand your sense of personal freedom without denying the realistic constraints we all face. Take more control of the future.

Questions 8–10:
This is your Hope Contagion score, ranging from 3 from 15. If you scored above 12, you are a model for others and consciously boost the hope of those around you. A low score suggests that you would benefit greatly from seeking out the support and companionship of high-hope people in your daily life.