Have hope in the future

It is interesting how some of these weekly columns come to be written. For instance, several months ago, my friend Harrison Levy shared with me a column from The Wall Street Journal that columnist Elizabeth Bernstein wrote about hope. I held on to that and in December I shared some of her thoughts with my readers of The Oklahoman and I quoted Bernstein who describes hope as a belief that the future can be better than the present and you have some power to make it so.

In response to that column, I received an email from Oklahoma City’s Jim Booher, who wrote that the column reminded him of the word “Timshel” as discussed in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Timshel is a Hebrew word that translates as “thou mayest,” as in, you can if you want to. So in my column on hope, which I suggested requires some action on our part, Jim felt we could say “we mayest” have hope — if we but make that choice.

Jim recalled that throughout 57 years of marriage to his wife, Jo, the rearing of their four children, and their attendant problems complicated by job searches or illness at the most inconvenient times, they seemed to have never lost the ability to hope and dream for a better and brighter tomorrow.

“How easy it might have been, given a choice, to turn Steinbeck’s ‘thou mayest’ (find hope) into ‘thou mayest not,’ ” he wrote.

His words brought to mind lines written by Mike Dooley, a New York Times Bestselling author, speaker, and entrepreneur: It’s true, the early bird gets the worm. So does the late bird and the bird-in-between. Because by design, there are always more than enough worms. In fact, the only bird that doesn’t get a worm is the bird that doesn’t go out to get one.