get your hope on
Oh, Emily Dickinson, I was feeling you yesterday . . . you and your ever-warbling Hope.
Spring has sprung in my corner of the world, just a few hundred miles south of the place you called home. And even though 2012 will be remembered as the winter that never was, the Northeast is still reveling in Mother Nature’s brush strokes of forgotten green, burgeoning daffodil patches and bursts of brazen crocuses.
Did I mention that it was almost 70 degrees last week? Yes, in March.
Then, Tuesday arrived on the scene. Maybe it was a perfect storm of the temperature taking a nose dive and me fighting the tail-end of a sore throat that made me feel like “one of those days” was about to unfold.
The truth is, I may never know the reason I bundled up to brave the 28 degree morning, but my sneakers never hit the pavement for the run I was craving. {Argh.}
Or, why my muse decided to make herself scarce when I sat down to work in spite of the creative sparks that had propelled me from sleep to scribble novel edits {legible this time!} in the notebook by my bed and then later, while I made coffee, capture dialogue for an entire new scene in iPhone Voice Memos {boo yah!} .
Sure, there’s more, but I don’t need to bore you with the details because you know the drill . . I was going to get in my own way until I decided to get out of my own way. It was that simple.
- an example of HOPErevo inspiration
For me, the fast track to catapulting out of a funk is to shift my focus by doing something for someone else. I decided to be inspired by the season — take a break, get outside and spread some hope secret agent-style.
My catalyst? HOPErevo, a hope revolution fueled by people who write anonymous notes to inspire others and then leave them in places
that they’re likely to be found. Krystyn Heide, a SquareSpace Senior Product Designer, launched this grassroots initiative in 2008. Since then, messages of encouragement have been planted and discovered around the world — stuck on the back of street signs, tucked under sugar bowls in coffee shops and slipped into books on library shelves.
(November 2015: The HOPErevo website is no longer functional, but you can check out random acts of HOPErevo inspiration in this Flickr stream.)
So, Emily, turns out a dose of poetry chased with an undercover joy mission was just the Rx I needed. When I got back to my desk, I jotted down one more HOPErevo message: KEEP GOING. YOU CAN DO IT.
P.S. I mixed up this GET YOUR HOPE ON Spotify playlist as another antidote for rough and tumble days.