Pressing Hope

Thoughts about hope generated by my recent reading of the book "Too Soon Old. Too Late Smart." by Gordon Livingston M.D.

The psychiatrist Gordon Livingston’s prescription for happiness is threefold:

1. Something meaningful to do.

2. Someone to love and be loved by.

3. Hope.

Doing something meaningful occurs in the present. Doing isn’t concerned with the past or the future. That would be “done” or “will do.” The act of loving or receiving love, is also in the present. While past love might contribute to present happiness, so does a breath you took 5 seconds ago. Another 25 seconds though…the satisfying flow of air into and out of your chest from that last breath will be quite forgotten.

It is Dr. Livingston’s third prescription, hope, that usually pulls a person’s focus away from the present and towards a typically nebulous time in the future. Hope is, by its nature, a feeling about the future. You never hope for something in the past nor do you hope for something in the present. The present either is or is not a certain way. In the past you may have hoped that extant conditions would exist, but that was your past self’s hope for the future. That future is the present.

I am not disagreeing with Dr. Livingston’s essential prescription, but I am saying that we should be hoping for something in the near future because we have more power to affect what happens to us in the short term than the long term. The long term is subject to many more factors outside of our influence than what happens to us by dinner time today.

Hope is also more powerful as a means to happiness when we adopt an evolving view of what to hope for. Hoping for things that future circumstances make actually possible or even likely, will increase our happiness and a belief in our own agency. Hope is different than fantasy. In fact, if it wouldn’t make Dr. Livingston’s prescription too clunky, I’d add on a 4th element of happiness: A belief in our own agency in our fate.

Today I may hope to be healthy for the next 25 years, but if tomorrow, I develop a fatal disease then I can increase my happiness by hoping to live 6 more good months and be close to my family and feel that they will thrive after my death, and I can hope that I can choose how I spend my remaining life.

This unsentimental approach to happiness and to mortality supports Dr Livingston’s statement that through following this prescription we may achieve a satisfying life or, as he poetically calls it, “this flicker of consciousness between two great silences.”

Hope is a present, given to you by yourself, and is best enjoyed as close to the present as possible.