The last few days of 2023 are spinning out like the last rings on a record. The scratch and hiss as the needle finally runs out of grooves. It’s time to change the tune. But right now, we’re all too lazy to get off the couch. Unless it’s to grab one of those raspberry thumbprint cookies out of the kitchen.

A little burst of sugar energy before dragging yourself out at the crack of noon for a few laps at Park City Mountain. Anything to take your mind off the pile of work that’s waiting on the desk in your office. The stack that’s topped with a big, white envelope marked “2023 TAX STUFF.” These final days of the year are the Sunday scaries on steroids.

And that’s when you see it. Something twinkling in a dark corner of your closet in a box you realize you can open any time you want. Hope is what you feel. And honestly, hope is exactly what you need in this moment. It’s what we all need.

When Pandora opened the box and unleashed all of the evils of the world, Hope was the one shining thing that remained. And as far as we know, she hasn’t flown away yet.

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all,” Emily Dickinson wrote.

It’s one of the simplest words and the greatest ideas. It’s what keeps us moving forward. It’s part of what makes us human. We make mistakes. We fall down. We hurt each other. We feel alone. We get lost. And hopefully, we find hope.

Barbara Kingsolver said, “The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”

Psychologist, researcher and hopeful optimist C.R. Snyder developed a theory about hope. He found that those with higher hopes tended to have better outcomes in academics, athletics, physical and mental health. He found zero evidence for so-called “false hope.” In a beautifully poetic flourish, he called his theory “Rainbows of the Mind.”

Snyder wrote that a rainbow “is a prism that sends shards of multicolored lights in various directions. It lifts our spirits and makes us think of what is possible. Hope is the same — a personal rainbow of the mind.”

In his exploration of hope, Snyder focused on will power, our will to shape our future; and way power, how we can envision the path to actually get there. 

In short, hope, like life, is what we make it.

And so we hope for peace and harmony. That the climate will change in a good way. Less screen time. More face time. We hope for our children’s success. For the Bills to win a Super Bowl. We hope to worry less. To live more. To lose weight. To find joy. To be safe. To belong. To be loved.

Hope is the sensible sister of optimism. Hope knows that sh*t happens. But she doesn’t just anticipate. She has a plan. An optimist can be hopeless. But a person with hope is an eternal optimist.

Sometimes hope is something we can achieve on our own. Sometimes, it’s a hope for what we can do together. It can be a hope that lets us face a difficult now and an uncertain future. It can just be a feeling that everything is going to be OK no matter what. Something good is going to happen. It has to. At least, that’s what we hope.

This is my hope for 2024. Which is really just a hope in this moment. That some unexpected magic will happen as it always does when you’re stumbling around in the darkness. That’s when you spy a tiny glint of something shiny that’s peeking out of a shoebox you stuffed in the back of your closet. A pair of silver sequin boots. You try them on. And step out into the light.