01/10/2026
When a new year dawns we want to feel hopeful. Although New Year’s Day is just another space on the calendar, we give it meaning by thinking it represents a chance to clear our heads and put behind us the troubles and struggles of the previous year. As a Jew, a Buddhist, and an American I’ve always been pleased at the thought of having three different new year’s celebrations within one calendar year. Lots of chances to begin again! We may hope on New Year’s Day that we will begin to take a fresh approach to our persistent problems. Things are new, or at least we want them to feel that way.
Hope encourages us to look forward confidently, and we may expect hope itself is necessary for us to get what we desire. Often when someone succeeds despite the odds, admirers say, “She never gave up hope.” In this way, hope is also a refuge, akin to having faith.
I know in the year past I have been alarmed and frightened by how much deceit and duplicity I see. It has been very hard not to get lost in the chaos and it takes strength not to dwell there. As with so many, I yearn for peace and stability and a lot less anger and hate, but I know I cannot achieve those things on my own. For many, remaining hopeful feels like a useless place to put their energy, but they don’t want to be hopeless.
In the Buddhist tradition we tend to be a little skeptical of hope, or perhaps it’s better to say we hold hope lightly. That doesn’t mean we are into hopelessness, quite the opposite in fact. But the opposite of hopelessness would be considered love, or connection, in contrast to trying to wrest control over life’s changes, which doesn’t do much for us. One cause of suffering is desire. When you get obsessed by or fixated on something specific that you want you may view yourself and the world around you from a deficit: Life would be perfect only if you could get that thing, person, experience. One can get lost in this craving, which only increases separation from the world as it is.
We try to see the world as it is with equanimity instead of craving and fixation. Equanimity — the balance that is born of wisdom — reminds us that what is happening in front of us is not the end of the story, it is just what we can see. Instead of being frightened of change, with equanimity, we can see its benefits and put our daily existence in a broader context. The hope resides in the certainty of relief not in specific outcomes, like getting exactly what we want; the hope comes from the way things actually are in this universe: This too shall pass.
In the meantime, you might ask, where is the hope? I have found a healing sense of hope in two places that are not attached to demanding a particular outcome. There is hope in remembering in the course of my life things have been bleak before, even bleaker than they are now. I am strong and there is much within me that responds well to adversity. There is hope in the certainty that things do change.
