Dealing with challenges makes us more resilient.
A few years ago, I was passing through the northern Nigerian city of Kano when I stopped at a roadside stall for some tea. The proprietor asked me where I was from. I told him.
“I want to go to America!” he told me, smiling. “We are just suffering here in Nigeria. If I go to America, I will not come back to Nigeria again.”
“Not even to see your mother?” I asked.
He laughed. “I will send her some money.”
I thanked him and drank my tea. After I left, I wondered if he was serious or just talking.
As I traveled through the region, I met several people headed north, on their way to Europe. It was a difficult and dangerous journey that tens of thousands of people set out on each year, many of them never reaching their destination. I often marveled at the confidence a person must have to embark on a trip like that, to leave everything behind, to be certain of somehow making it.
Like most people, I’d always assumed these travelers were the most poverty-stricken, the most hopeless. But now I can see that this isn’t the case – at least not entirely. Often, the people who leave their villages are the brightest and most ambitious ones, the ones with the biggest dreams. As one poet from Cameroun wrote after arriving in Spain, “No money in the pockets/But hope in the heart.” Hope, as much as anything else, drives them.
Hope may be our most important asset as a species. Hope is the thing that drew us out of our caves and around the world. Hope is what gets us out of bed in the morning. Hope lets us imagine our lives as more than they are. Yet when we talk about hope, we usually mean the vague feeling that things will get better. But that is not hope.
One of the foremost experts on the science of hope, the late C.R. Snyder, defined it as “a learned way of thinking about oneself in relation to goals” and noted that it is “the essential process of linking oneself to potential success.” Hope is having confidence that you can do what you set out to do, whether that is crossing a desert or getting a job or mastering a craft. “High-hope” individuals, as a result, have more goals overall, more difficult goals, and more success at achieving those goals than “low-hope” people. They are also happier, recover more quickly from physical injuries, and have less work-related burnout. Most important, they see themselves as being in control of their lives.
Snyder believed this is a quality that can be cultivated, and one that develops early in life. Hope is born from struggle – from learning that we can rise to the challenges life presents. And we, in turn, are born to deal with struggle. In his 1994 book, The Psychology of Hope, Snyder cited studies that found that if you give toddlers a choice of two toys, one freely available and the other behind a barrier, they will almost invariably be drawn to the one behind the barrier. And when they achieve a goal, such as figuring out how to get that toy, they become more confident that they will achieve others. This has a protective effect for the challenges that lie ahead. This is how we learn to hope.
When I read this, I thought back to Nigeria, and to other parts of Africa, where there is no shortage of daily struggle. Was that why so many people kept getting into rickety boats to cross the Mediterranean? Was that why my ancestors came from Europe to America, full of hope? Was it because of the hard lives they’d had – the challenges they had already overcome?
If so, this raises some questions for those of us in wealthy countries, where it sometimes seems that our main pursuit is a life devoid of discomforts. Today, the trend among parents is to smooth the road in front of our children. We put rubber bumpers on every surface. We cook special meals. We help write college entrance essays. We don’t want our children to fall, to fail, or to be hurt in any way. We want them to have an easy life.
As the father of two girls, I’ve tried to avoid this, but it doesn’t always go over well. One day we were at a playground, and I was reading a magazine when I heard someone yelling: “Sir! Sir!” I looked up to see who was being called, and saw a man pointing at me and gesticulating wildly. “Sir!” he said. “Your daughter is going to fall!”
I jumped up. There was my youngest (then around three), standing on a platform about as tall as my head. She was holding on to a bar and leaning out over the sandy ground. I could see she was trying to figure out a way down, but kids kept coming up the way she wanted to go. I stood there for a minute, trapped between humiliation and relief. Then I sat back down and watched her finally make her way down by another route.
I worry sometimes about this collective effort to make our children’s lives easier. And I’m not the only one. The writer Luke Epplin notes that children’s films have been taken over by what he calls the “magic-feather syndrome,” in which a character’s greatest liability suddenly helps him magically realize his impossible dreams. “It’s enough,” he writes, “for [the protagonists] simply to show up with no experience at the world’s most competitive races, dig deep within themselves, and out-believe their opponents.” Their only struggle, in other words, is not having what they want. They overcome this by wanting harder.
I don’t want my daughters to feel that is what they should expect. So when my older daughter turned six and we gave her a choice of any movie to watch, I was relieved and heartened when she picked a film made long before convenience and comfort became human rights. I was glad to hear her say she wanted to watch Old Yeller.
The movie had come up in a discussion about rabies. I knew it was a hard one, and I made sure she knew what she was in for. Even when I told her the end, she held firm, so we all sat down to watch it. There was more to it than I remembered. It starts with 14-year-old Travis being left with his mother and brother while his father goes on a months-long cattle drive. Travis has to deal with razorback boars, lecherous neighbors, attacking bears, and the rabid wolf Yeller fights off.
There are no magic feathers. It’s a surprisingly honest film, with none of today’s happily-ever-after platitudes. It felt real in a way kids’ movies don’t anymore. At the end, Travis’ father comes home and pulls him aside.
“Now and then,” he tells Travis, “for no good reason a man can figure out, life will just haul off and knock him flat. But it’s not all like that. … And you can’t afford to waste the good part fretting about the bad.”
That was what I wanted my daughter to hear, and to know. Life is hard. You fall, then you get back up. Then you keep going. Hope is not magic. Hope is hard-won. Hope is not what you have. Hope is what you do. — Frank Bures