A Spotters Guide to the Revolution
Hope and Shaping The Life You Want
It’s the nature of our brains that fear gets the lion’s share of our attention unless we actively change it — neurologically, we need to “call in” hope.
Wonder helps us to call in hope. Wonder is a complex emotion often associated with joy, fascination, surprise, awe, and admiration. It’s a response to an experience that leads us to marvel at the complexities and mysteries of the world. Wonder opens our minds to the infinite possibilities, broadens our perspective, and catalyzes creative thinking.
Fear is a fundamental, primal emotion with clear evolutionary advantages. It is linked to the survival instinct and triggers the body’s fight, flight, or freeze response to perceived threats. Because of its evolutionary importance, fear is often present at a low level in our brains, ready to go live on a dime. Hope, on the other hand, is a more complex and higher-order emotion, not as immediate or reflexive as fear.
Unlike fear, hope requires a more deliberate cognitive process — that “calling in” — and is often associated with planning, future-oriented thinking, and goal-setting.
That sounds difficult — but it’s actually magic. Having fun, lighting yourself up with wonder, and letting joy and awe be an inexhaustible energy source helps you “call in” hope.
Calling in hope is active, like taking a walk in the park, listening to a great song, stargazing, or scratching your dog so their leg goes nuts and wondering why. With wonder-ing, you’ve done your part to “call in” hope. Now, let your brain do its thing.
Our brains play a significant role in our experience of wonder. When we encounter something joy- or awe-inspiring (joy and awe are the two primary buckets of wonder from a neurological perspective), the experience activates our autonomic nervous system, which can result in a feeling of expansiveness and connectedness.
This is perhaps my favorite part of how our brains work: because having fun, lighting yourself up with wonder, and letting joy and awe be an inexhaustible energy source to help you call in hope, it is literally in your own best interest to go for it. Wonder and hope bundle to be the X Factor getting you on your way to personal agency — the power and ability each of us has to make choices and take actions that shape our lives. Adding play, discovery, and imagination supercharges you to shape the life you want.
“Hope inspires the good to reveal itself.” — Emily Dickinson.
How might you call in hope? How do you experience wonder? Are you more of a joy-wonder person or an awe-wonder type? I’m biased toward joy. Joy sparks me. Awe calms me, though. So either way, win/win. Get curious about wonder-ing, and follow your nose.
I have found it empowering to understand these facts and to use these techniques to partner with my brain to get to what the Irish poet laureate Seamus Heaney expressed as good worth working for:
“Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.” — Seamus Heaney
I’d love to hear about your good worth working for, your wonder-ing. I’m infinitely curious about what sparks wonder in people, and I love hearing about whether you’re joy- or awe-biased or if you’re a-bit-of-both-please. Tell me all about it in the comments. Claps are nice, too.
