Hope And The Power of Reframing

Guest post by Julie Neraas – Thank you!

I have learned through chronic illness that one way hope stays alive is if you can ‘reframe’ your situation. This is not about pretending things are better than they are. It’s not about dishonesty or a stiff upper lip or cheap optimism. It is about putting into practice one of the most helpful life skills – the ability to reframe things.

I used to be an athlete who felt most alive when I was moving. I have run hundreds of miles, from my teenage years in the country lanes where I grew up, to as an adult jogging or walking around Minneapolis’ beautiful inner city lakes. I played competitive tennis for thirty years and even directed a tennis school. I loved skiing, biking and swimming. When those activities were no longer possible, it was devastating. The grief I felt was huge and I fought it tooth and nail. There just wasn’t a good substitute for physical movement and the way it made me feel fully alive. At the same time I had learned, while being a chaplain in a treatment center for people struggling with drug and alcohol addiction, that while you can’t choose what life delivers up you do have choices about how to respond. And I was forced to move into other identities and other ways of finding life.

Sometimes I would coach myself, saying things like, “Well, Julie, you are more than an athlete, you are also a scholar and a writer, with lots of intellectual curiosity. Focus on that. These are doors that are still open to you.” At times this was hardly comforting, even if it was true. But living a life of regret would have kept me looking backwards, rather than forwards. Hope is forward leaning. It’s the ripple of energy that trusts there are resources enough to live into the future. I had to focus on what I could do, not what I could not.

Thankfully there are plenty of people who have been my inspiration. One of them is the late Audre Lorde, a poet, essayist and activist who dealt with advanced liver cancer in midlife. She kept a journal through that time and published it as A Burst of Light. In the following passage Lorde writes from a cancer clinic in Berlin during very difficult days;

How do I hold faith with sun in a sunless place? It is so hard not to counter this despair with a refusal to see. But I have to stay open and filtering no matter what’s coming at me, because that arms me with a particularly Black woman’s way. When I’m open I’m also less despairing […] I know I can broaden the definition of winning to the point where I can’t lose. A Burst of Light, Firebrand Books, Ithaca, New York, p. 61.

The last line bowls me over. For Lorde winning meant not crumpling before uncertainty and the resolve to life each day fully, even if she couldn’t live forever. And that’s what I am trying to do – live life fully, right now.

- Julie Neraas

Julie Neraas is the author of Apprenticed to Hope: A Sourcebook for Difficult Times. She is a Presbyterian pastor, spiritual director and professor at Hamline University and speaks regularly about hope; where it can guide you, how it can sustain you and what meaning it can bring to your life. For more information visit www.julieneraas.com.

Photo credit to KKendall for the Audre Lorde photo and to Gadl for the Reframing knot photo

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