Hope and Cancer

Finding Balance Through Hope: The Guiding Star in Cancer
By Norma Schmidt

"If you don't have hope, you don't even feel like getting out of bed in the morning," someone said to me recently.

How true.

We need hope as much as we need air, water and food.

When cancer strikes, hope plays a vital role, finding a healthy balance that avoids both false optimism and pessimism.

Not to badmouth optimism.

Hope supports a HEALTHY optimism, an emotionally intelligent attitude that increases our power to take positive action.

The problem is FALSE optimism -- the head-in-the-sand kind that says "ignorance is bliss" and tries to eliminate fear. False optimism leads to unbalanced decision-making and collapses when reality shatters illusion.

The opposite exreme is pessimism. Here, fear balloons out of control, and a dark cloud of "gloom and doom" seems to follow us everywhere. Pessimism leads to feelings of helplessness and to premature "giving iup."

Hope guides us on a middle path.

"This is the great paradox of true hope: Because nothing is absolutely determined there is not only reason to fear but also readon to hope," says Jerome Groopman, M.D., in The Anatomy of Hope. "And so we must find ways to bridle fear and give greater rein to hope."

Taking risks and dangers into account, hope keeps fear within healthy bounds and finds the best way forward.

The results: endurance and courage.

Mark Twain said, "Courage is the mastery of fear, not the absence of fear."

With hope as our guiding star, we can navigate the rough waters of cancer and find the way to healing.

TIP: When fear feels overwhelming, arrange to talk with someone you can trust to support your hope. Meanwhile, take time for pleasant activities that help you focus on the hear-and-now, rather than on a frightening imagined future.

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