The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

by Frank Ostaseski

Often it transforms into what I have come to call mature hope, a hope that takes us inside ourselves and toward finding the good in the experience. Mature hope requires both a clear intention and a simultaneous letting go. This hope is not dependent upon outcome. In fact, hope is tied to uncertainty because we never know what is going to happen next. The hope is in the potential for our awakened response, not in things turning out a particular way. It is an orientation of the heart, grounded in value and trust in our basic human goodness, not in what we might achieve. That fundamental trust guides our actions and allows us to cooperate with others and to persevere, without attachment to a specific result. In illness, mature hope helps us come to a place of wholeness, even if a cure is unavailable. When we relax our single-minded vision of the future—the idea that “this is the only way for things to happen”—we are no longer trapped by our conventional view of hope. We leave room for surprise.