Thursday Thoughts...

“The very least you can do in your life is to 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.” 

Barbara Kingsolver

So many quotes about life spend time with ideas like this I think, but I chose to spend time with this one because I saw the image of living inside hope in my head.

And then I began to investigate (such a big word for ponder!) it and thought about how she had chosen the words least and most as part of it.

I think she suggests that understanding what you hope for, and wish for, is a key element of living a satisfying and rewarding life. It's not only the least you can do - it's the very least. She really thinks it is the baseline. Her use of figuring out also made me think that perhaps it an ongoing process, and that it changes, modifies and moves around as we grow, move and change ourselves.

I am not sure if the use of the word most equates to the best you can do. Or if it is more about scale - the largest amount of time or energy. Whichever way that falls, it seems that she thinks it is almost the ultimate goal, the notion of living within that hope.

I like both these ideas and recognise that I probably don't spend all that much time considering how they are being enacted in my life.

The inside of my head visualisation of this didn't involve a house and a roof so much as an umbrella.  Perhaps that is because I might find it hard to commit to a full dwelling. I might not be brave enough to build my life of hope and live completely and utterly within it; instead I can find ways of being sheltered from weather and storms beneath my hope.

There is a whole other way of interrogating those notions I am sure, but not today.

Building a house, July 2007.