What can teachers do to feel hopeful?

A marmot in Hurricane Ridge. Photos by Dana Fraser.

By Dana Fraser, teacher, Sooke

Hopefulness is not my natural orientation. It’s something that I’ve really struggled to find. For a long time, I didn’t know what to do to help myself feel more hopeful. Hopelessness always got the best of me. But hopelessness doesn’t feel good, and it doesn’t help us be better teachers and better people. Even after spending a few years researching hope as a doctoral student, I couldn’t figure out how to actually apply what I learned to create hope for myself. But I’m starting to figure it out—finally! In this narrative article, I share my experience of infusing more hope into my life.

Find your deepest experience of hope

Where do you feel the most hopeful? What are you doing? Who are you with? For me, I feel the most hopeful at Hurricane Ridge, when I’m on my annual wildlife photography trip to the Olympic Mountains in Washington State. These jagged basalt peaks, cloaked in ancient glaciers, soar straight out of the Pacific Ocean to a height of nearly 8,000 feet. The highest mountain in the range is Mt. Olympus. This isn’t, of course, Mt. Olympus, house of the gods, but to me these mountains have a magic of their own. Looking at them never gets old. Feeling the icy wind blowing off the glaciers, breathing in the mountain air, listening for marmot whistles, and following marmots, blacktailed deer, and blue grouse with my camera in hand as they scurry through the meadow plants, I do feel hope. It’s the most hopeful I ever feel in my life.

It feels like an incandescent kind of hope. Think of the old-fashioned incandescent lightbulb: warm, sustained, present, relaxed but energized. There’s no sharpness or harshness to the experience. I feel brave enough to start doing the things that scare me. The etymology of incandescence means to begin to glow from within. And in the mountains, hope truly does feel like that to me.

It is more of an embodied, somatic experience than anything else. I am more aware of my feelings than my thoughts. All I really think about is how I should stop talking myself out of doing things just because they’re scary. When I’m there, I think I could achieve anything (but in a humble way). This incandescent hope, ephemeral and transcendent, fills my whole being. It is a reprieve from the everyday phenomena like stress and worry that we all experience.

A blacktailed deer. 

Find your alignment

It might sound funny, but my two biggest goals in life were to get a doctorate and learn how to ride a horse. I love the cowboy aesthetic. I love the prairie. And I know that having hobbies and having things to look forward to helps people stay hopeful. While my deepest experience of hope is photographing wildlife at Hurricane Ridge, I can’t be there all the time. So, what can I do on a regular basis in my day-to-day life to stay hopeful? I decided to take horse-riding lessons three times a week.

Riding horses has been great for fostering hopefulness because it gives me a break from everything negative. There is so much to think about when you’re riding. You have to pay attention to the horse, to your riding position, to your surroundings, and to your instructor. There’s no room in my brain to dwell on my problems or anything negative. I’m fully absorbed in the moment. It really is therapeutic. And it gives me meaningful goals to work toward.

If you can recognize moments when you feel the most well and happy, try to think about what individual components make up that experience. This will help you figure out your alignment.

One of the things I learned from riding is the importance of having good alignment. When we ride, we’re supposed to have our body aligned so that our ear, shoulder, hip, and heel are on top of each other in a straight line. If we’re out of alignment, and if we are carrying too much tension, we will bounce in the saddle, which is not comfortable for the horse or the rider. Bouncing indicates that things are going wrong.

The concept of alignment in horseback riding made me think about how to align other areas of my life to nurture hope-fulness. My favourite things are being outdoors, interacting with animals, exercising, and having creative projects to work on. And if I had to add a fifth thing, I’d say it’s learning things. Things that make me feel the most hopeful follow this alignment. It’s things like hiking in the forest near my house, kayaking with the turtles and herons, or working on writing a children’s book. These are things I can do on a daily basis throughout the year to help myself stay hopeful. They’re all part of keeping my life in good alignment.

Dana Fraser.

What practical steps can teachers take to feel more hopeful?

Hope won’t help us if we think of it too philosophically—it has to be put into practice. I do understand the pragmatic reality of teachers’ lives. I’m a busy teacher too, but I know I can’t be my best, happiest, and healthiest self unless I make conscious choices that nurture my hope. My mental health needs are just as important as my work needs, and they need to be integrated.

As a teacher who spent a long time studying hope in an academic setting, and even longer trying to embed hope into my own life, this is my advice to teachers on how to be hopeful: if you can, invest time in self-reflection and self-discovery. Try to pay attention to where you are and what you’re doing when you feel your best. Hopefulness is intertwined with our well-being and happiness. If you can recognize moments when you feel the most well and happy, try to think about what individual components make up that experience. This will help you figure out your alignment.

Once you identify what your personal hope building blocks are, build them into your daily schedule—and treat them with the same importance as your work and family responsibilities. So, if you need to take the kids to a ballet lesson after school, instead of using that 50 minutes to rush to the grocery store, use the time to walk around the block, talk to someone you love on the phone, or knit, if that does the therapeutic job for you. Use your knowledge of your alignment to set meaningful goals that you can think about and work toward every day. See if you can find a hobby that is so fun and absorbing you can’t think about your problems at the same time. This way you are building mental breaks into your life. And keep a hope journal. That’s a new practice I started this year on the first day of school. Every day I write down what I did to nurture my hopefulness. That might be going to lunch with a friend, spending time outdoors, or working on a creative project. And at the end of the year, you can review your journal and see what worked to create hopefulness and what didn’t. Think about hope every day, and talk about hope in your schools.

There will always be temptations to feel hopeless. The world is imperfect and life can be really hard. Being hopeful might feel like swimming upstream, but we need hope to keep our heads above water. The purpose of this narrative article is to share an account of how a teacher who isn’t naturally hopeful can find hope. It’s hard to put such a personally meaningful experience into words (and we don’t have a word for everything) but I hope other teachers can think about where they are and what they are doing when they feel hopeful, and try to spend more time doing the things that make them feel that way.