There have been moments in my life — and I suspect in yours — when hope felt not just distant but completely irrational. When the diagnosis came back bad. When the relationship ended. When the depression settled in so deeply that getting out of bed felt like climbing a mountain. In those moments, the cheerful advice to "stay positive" lands like a slap.
What I have learned after 56 years of Buddhist practice is that real hope is not a feeling. It is a decision. And sometimes, it is an almost irrational act of will — a refusal to be defeated even when every circumstance argues for giving up.
Hope Is Something You Make
Daisaku Ikeda wrote: "Hope is not a lucky charm you carry in your pocket. It is something you forge in the furnace of your own life."
That has been my experience exactly. The times I have felt the most genuine, durable hope were not the easy times. They were the times I chanted through tears. The times I showed up to SGI meetings when I didn't feel like it. The times I called my therapist and said, "I don't know how to get through this," and then got through it anyway.
Hope, in the Buddhist sense, is not optimism. Optimism says things will probably work out. Hope says: I will work to make them work out, and even if they don't, I will not be destroyed by it.
The Darkest Moments Are the Most Important
Nichiren wrote to his followers during some of the most brutal persecution of his life. He was exiled, nearly executed, and watched his disciples suffer. And yet his letters from that period are among the most encouraging documents in all of Buddhist literature.
He understood something that took me decades to grasp: the darkness is not the enemy of hope. It is the condition that makes hope necessary — and therefore possible.
When my wife was diagnosed with MS in 1996, I did not feel hopeful. I felt terrified. But I chanted. She chanted. We leaned on our practice and on each other. And something shifted — not the circumstances, not immediately, but something inside us. A kind of bedrock formed beneath the fear.
That bedrock is what I would call hope. Not the hope that everything will be fine. The hope that we have what it takes to face whatever comes.
What To Do When You Can't Feel It
If you are reading this in a dark place, I want to say something directly: you do not have to feel hopeful in order to act hopefully.
Chant even when it feels hollow. Reach out to one person even when you want to disappear. Take one small action toward the life you want, even when that life feels impossibly far away.
The feeling follows the action. It almost never works the other way around.
After more than five decades of practice, I still have days when hope feels thin. But I have never — not once — regretted chanting through those days. Because on the other side, without exception, something opens up.
That is the promise of this practice. Not that life will stop being hard. But that you will never face it alone, and that within you is a life force more powerful than any obstacle.
That is worth getting up for. Every single morning.
