How do we manifest this disposition of hope to the world? Because it is hope we’re talking about. It isn’t a hopeless person who decides to get up in the morning and keep going, keep working, keep striving for even tiny, seemingly insignificant improvements to life and the common good. Hope sustains us, pushes us forward, inspires us to keep putting one foot in front of the other, even when we think it’s all but abandoned us, all but run out.
Hope is what we bring with us when we return to a well-worn story: the hope to discover something new, to find solace in something old. Hope is what a gaggle of preteen boys brought to a sleepover-bound-movie about Ewoks: What’s this new chapter in an old story have to say? And it’s what a little girl and her father bring to a pile of plastic bricks: What experience might we create and imagine together?
Hope demands action. Hope is built upon practice, and it breeds a disposition. Hope in a future that has yet to be imagined, that’s worth working for, that’s worth upsetting the status quo over, is what separates rebels from stormtroopers.
Hope is what we bring to the questions of greatest importance. What might we find here, now, in this place, that we might make use of tomorrow?
—Excerpted from My Life with the Jedi: The Spirituality of Star Wars by Eric A. Clayton
