Hope Intervention 1

This is the audio track of the first in a series of web video conferences focusing on hope and future orientation. It's geared toward practitioners and clinicians, but anyone can understand it. In the actual web series, there are slides, so you might hear Julia talking about a slide or two, but the audio descriptions should be clear enough to understand the gist. Clinical psychologist Michael Sapiro also leads a visualization about connecting to your future self.

Transcript

Hello,

Everyone.

Thanks for being here for the hope intervention.

We plan for this to be 10 minutes of education about the science of hope.

10 minutes of the actual intervention part or the part that is the activity,

Which is this time of meditation,

And 10 minutes of question and answers.

So we will go very quickly,

But hopefully very useful.

We'll see.

This is the first time I'm doing this.

And it just came into my head on Wednesday morning that I needed to do this.

My name's Julia Mossbridge.

My background's in,

I'm a scientist and my background's in time and time perception.

I come at hope from the angle of most of my life being fascinated with my own relationship with my future self and having early experiences that I survived and actually ended up thriving,

Even though they're difficult experiences.

I think partly due to a very robust relationship with my future self,

Which I'll talk about later.

But that's what brings me here and the study of time and human beings' relationship to their future and time itself.

And I'm here with Dr.

Michael Sapiro,

Who will introduce himself at the beginning of the meditation section.

He's a meditation teacher and researcher and a clinical psychologist.

So we come at this from very different angles,

But we're very simpatico on our approaches.

I'd like to share my screen.

I have a presentation.

Here we go.

And this is an office libre,

Which I just downloaded.

And looks like that's working.

Good.

Hopefully you're seeing my screen.

Okay,

Here we go.

Michael,

Would you text me on my phone if people are not seeing my screen?

Okay,

Here we are.

So I first want to say that I'm the executive director of this nonprofit called the Institute for Love and Time,

Or TILT.

You can learn more about it at gotilt.

Org.

And we're focused right now especially on a project where we're trying to increase future orientation around the world and specifically in the United States.

And so I'll talk a little bit about future orientation.

In fact,

I'll talk a lot about future orientation.

So I'm grateful to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that has funded a large portion of that project.

So I'm not asking for money.

And actually,

If you're thinking about donating,

Your dollars will go towards better towards a food pantry or another organization right now that needs your money.

We are funded for this project.

And so thank you very much.

You're welcome to learn about the organization.

If you want to look at other projects,

That's great.

So what I hope to talk about today is that hope,

I believe,

Is a public health issue that is under recognized.

I also believe it's a personal health issue that's under recognized.

And in fact,

I kind of think of it as this time in our history as the time went before we really got it that we all need to be doing hope workouts every day,

Kind of like we know that we're supposed to be exercising physically every day.

And eventually this will be clear and people will just put this into their daily routines.

But right now,

I think there needs to be a hope intervention.

So that's why I believe this is important.

So just some terminology for those who like this.

Otherwise,

You could just sort of sail through this until the meditation.

So future orientation is a scientific term that I believe approaches hope.

So a future orientation is the extent to which a person habitually hopes for plans and prepares to meet future goals.

So you can think of it as your time horizon over which you are extending yourself and making a plan for yourself of being motivated by your future self.

And a hope would be kind of equivalent to a robust future orientation.

So it's future-based optimism.

You might have faith.

You might have intentions and plans that support your future thriving.

And we know that a robust future orientation is extensive in that it extends over months and years,

Not just minutes or days,

But you got to start somewhere.

It's adaptive.

So it's flexible.

It's realistic.

It's not,

Well,

So my future orientation is that tomorrow I'll win the lottery.

It's more like,

Let's take the information in about what's actually happening and then we'll make plans and goals and intentions and have faith around that.

And it's habitual.

It's mostly unconscious.

A robust future orientation is actually,

I noticed when I was a kid in a situation where there were lots of high socioeconomic status people around me,

That a robust future orientation is taught almost unconsciously by parents who are well-educated and have high resources to their kids.

So it's very interesting.

We'll talk more about that.

Very excited about this meta-analysis that came up from some researchers at the University of Amsterdam,

2018.

They looked at 77 studies of 31,

558 people.

This is their model,

Their psychological model they were looking at.

On the left,

You have the future time perspective,

Which is another name for future orientation,

Different kinds of constructs,

The kind of focus,

Whether it's specific like tomorrow I'm going to work out to increase my physical health or general.

I generally like to do things in the future that support my thriving.

And then the outcomes are education,

Work and health.

The reason there's a red square around the mixture of cognition,

Behavioral intention and affect is because thinking,

Intentions to do something and feelings are the things that were most specifically linked in the end to education,

Work and health outcomes.

So for those of you who like tables,

Here's a table with red boxes around the effect sizes,

Which are all around 0.

2-ish and the P values,

Which show that in each case for education,

Work and health,

There seems to be a significant relationship between overall future time perspective or future orientation and the outcome.

The reason there's a box around the effect size is to remind me to tell you that this effect size at around 0.

2 is about the same as the link between cholesterol or bad cholesterol and cardiovascular status.

So there's definitely other factors going on.

It's not a huge link,

But it's something that you could potentially control.

And just to point out,

This is a correlational study causation we're going to talk about later,

But there are studies showing causation as well.

So what we know from other studies and partly from that study is that a strong future orientation happens at a time in your life when you're mentally healthy,

When you have high socioeconomic status,

When you have addictions that are acceptable.

And the reason I say acceptable addictions rather than no addictions is because most of us have one type of addiction or another and maybe it's a work addiction or maybe it's an addiction to money or maybe it's addiction to your phone and these are largely acceptable.

Or maybe it's an addiction to drugs or alcohol or sex and these are less acceptable.

When you're feeling physically healthy,

When you're connected to community.

So there's studies supporting all of these as predicting a strong future orientation.

So let's talk about when people have a weak future orientation,

When they're not feeling mentally healthy or if they have been diagnosed with a mental illness.

If they have low socioeconomic status,

If they have an unacceptable addiction or even an acceptable addiction socially that's hurting their life regardless of its acceptability.

When they're not physically healthy,

So when you're sick,

Your future orientation goes down.

This all makes sense,

Right?

Your future orientation is clearly going to be partially linked to what's happening in your life.

Your expectations about what's going to happen in the future match what's happening in the past but not always and we'll talk about that.

Or if you're not feeling connected to your community.

So in this case,

This guy is with his dog which is not enough.

So being connected to a community of humans.

So notice that each of these pieces,

Now with what we're going through with coronavirus,

Each of these pieces is going to represent a larger percentage of the population and certainly some people who are here today can relate to at least one of these pieces either in their past or their present or their potential future.

So hope is a public health issue.

And I hope that it's clear that hope is a personal health issue in that you or someone you love or someone you work with might be having one of those experiences or might have had or have one of those experiences in the future.

So then I want to talk about briefly that there is a hope workout that works and that you can do.

So many people relate to their future selves like this person on the left or this person on the right.

So the person on the left doesn't even have,

They have all these sort of steps before them but they're not in the picture.

They don't see themselves there.

So they're not willing or they don't have practice in seeing themselves in the future.

That might be people in this room.

I'm sure in my life it's been me sometimes.

On the right-hand side,

This person sees themselves in the future but it's an upside down version of themselves.

It's too far removed from themselves.

It's almost like a different person.

In fact,

There are studies looking at brain activity when someone is thinking about their future self and oftentimes the areas of the brain that relate to thinking about someone else rather than thinking about yourself end up lighting up.

This is a distant relationship with your future self.

You also might have a closer relationship with your future self but you might be blinding each other in the sense of you might be not letting yourself connect.

So you might say,

Yeah,

That's me over there but we're not going to look at the world correctly.

We're not going to get accurate information and we're not going to help each other out.

For fear of,

For instance,

Being delusional.

Like my future self doesn't exist yet so it's crazy to think that I can connect with my future self instead of allowing yourself to imagine.

Just like we imagined,

For instance,

In the past,

Yesterday's self.

Frankly,

There's no proof that yesterday's self exists except maybe a video but we can't prove to anyone that that actually happened yesterday.

So we think it's perfectly normal to agree that yesterday's self existed.

Tomorrow's self,

There can be no video of but we get to imagine it just like we can imagine a memory.

That's what I want to talk with you about is the relationship with your future self.

That's the hope workout is enhancing that.

I'll give you some evidence for that in a second but just different examples of the relationship with your future self.

You could be doing parallel play.

You could both be keeping each other company,

Doing the same kind of thing.

You could be looking at each other and appreciating each other and loving each other.

You could be looking back on your life together and saying,

Look what we did.

In other words,

It's a way to connect with yourself over time so that you're not alone and especially helpful in a situation where you don't know if there's anyone else you can trust or if you are physically alone.

Multiple studies,

We can talk about these in future sessions.

Multiple studies show that your connection with your future self can be strengthened with practice,

Leads to increasing your future orientation which I'm calling equivalent to hope essentially or at least a robust future orientation seems equivalent to hope to me.

It improves well-being and in some cases physical health.

This is something we ought to be doing.

I talked about the causal.

I said I was going to talk about the causal stuff later.

Here's a graph showing a longitudinal study of the relationship between people's past and future selves or depending on how you look at it,

Present and future selves.

In 1995 they were asked what's the similarity between your future self and the current self on various different metrics.

What is the personality like?

What are the feelings like?

And on the Y axis you have the life satisfaction 10 years later.

Life satisfaction controlling for the initial life satisfaction in 1995 was significantly correlated with your perceived similarity between your present and future self.

The more connected in time you felt to your future regardless of your life satisfaction in 1995,

The more life satisfaction you had in 2005.

Really cool study.

So I hope this brief introduction to the science of hope has created a new idea that it's really okay to work on connecting with an imagined future self that is wiser because even if it is five minutes from now it is five minutes smarter than you are right now.

That could actually support you.

Just briefly my own experience when I was a kid and going through trauma,

I imagined my future self at around the age of 40 just looking at me and supporting me.

And then when I was at the age of 40 I did some exercises to go back and imagine that I could support myself.

It's very helpful.

More about that later if you want.

For those who want to treat this as a class you can do homework this week.

Start with one hope workout and we will send out a meditation by Michael that you can use as your hope workout or try another hope workout such as writing a letter to yourself from your future self or you can try in the morning recording a note to your or typing out a note I like to do this on my phone to your evening time self and listening to it and in your evening time making another note for your morning self.

Making this connection across time.

So thanks for listening and now I would like to pass this over to Dr.

Michael Sapero my wonderful friend and colleague on this future orientation project who will lead us in a meditation.

Now I have to find Michael.

So I can unmute him.

Michael can you unmute yourself?

There you are.

There we go.

Okay great.

I'm going to mute myself now.

Thanks Michael.

That was funny.

I was thinking how much my wife would love to have a mute button.

Let me see.

Can you guys hear me?

For me?

Well good morning everyone.

How good is it to be in a community even virtually right now with each other.

Thank you for joining us.

My name is Mike or Michael Sapero.

I'm a clinical psychologist,

Meditation teacher.

I teach the art and science of transformation and a part of that is learning to have a truly loving relationship to ourselves.

The self we've grown through,

Lived in,

The body we've lived in,

The mind and spirit and the self that's ahead of us.

Whatever that means or looks like.

So the work I do is with patients or large groups opening the gate of the heart to include all versions of our self because truly it's very hard to get the type of love we need from others if we're not doing it and giving it and feeling it in ourselves.

So we're going to do a meditation that introduces this concept in the felt sense in the body.

So I'd like to encourage you to find a position or posture that's comfortable.

We're going to pretty much start in a few moments actually.

That means being in a posture that's not rigid but that's firm.

The shoulders might be back and down.

I encourage you to close your eyes if you'd like.

You're welcome to close your eyes,

Bring your hands to your lap on the knees,

By the belly.

And if you're really needing deep connection to yourself you might think about bringing your hands to the heart and to the belly.

Here we are all together as a group.

Let's take a deep breath in and sigh.

And this next sigh,

Sigh into the body.

Inhale and sigh.

So drop your attention into the body as if getting into a warm bath or under the covers.

Let the mind rest in the body as the body rests on the chair or the cushion or the couch.

Begin to breathe slowly and deeply through the nose into the body.

And in your mind tell yourself slow and steady.

Slow and steady.

And feel your body's response.

You might tell yourself it's okay to rest.

It's okay to rest.

As the mind wanders as it tends to do,

Gently guide your attention back to the body breathing.

Rest your mind gently on the body breathing.

Feel the vibrant sensations of the body,

The body alive with sensation.

Notice any feelings like tension,

Tightness,

Restlessness,

Energy,

Ease,

Calm.

Just notice and breathe into this experience.

And now bring your attention up behind the eyes,

Deep behind the eyes to the center of the brain.

Imagine seeing a huge screen in front of you or the infinite space of imagination in the mind.

And think of a time in your past,

It could be yesterday,

It could be years ago where you were struggling.

So picture yourself in that situation,

Not the worst of them,

But just a time you were struggling.

Notice how your body feels as you see yourself struggling.

Right now bring up a sense of compassion for yourself,

That struggling suffering self.

And feel a sense of love radiating from you to the self that was suffering,

Struggling.

You might tell yourself,

I know it was hard.

I see you and I love you.

What message would you like to tell yourself?

Looking at yourself struggling or suffering.

Right here,

What message would you like to tell yourself?

The self that was suffering.

Allow this connection between you,

Within you to be bolstered by love,

Radiating love.

Allow this image to drop,

Return to the body breathing,

Ground in the breath.

And now imagine yourself in the future,

Could be 10 minutes from now or 10 years.

Picture yourself in the future.

What are you wearing?

What are you doing?

Let your heart imagine your future for you.

Imagine your future self turning and looking at you,

Radiating love towards you,

And you radiating love towards you.

What message does your future self have for you?

What does she or he say to you?

And feel your body's response.

Thank your future self,

Sending love,

Receiving love.

Just feel your body,

The response.

Breathe into this body now here,

Fully alive.

Ground in this very moment,

Opening your awareness wide around you to sound,

Color and light,

Hands being.

Notice life living itself through your awareness.

I would like to end this practice with a poem by Wendell Berry.

Just stay an open presence,

Loving awareness.

I Go Among Trees by Wendell Berry.

I go among trees and sit still.

All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.

My tasks lie in their places where I left them,

Asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes and lives a while in my sight.

What it fears in me leaves me and the fear of me leaves it.

It sings and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.

I live for a while in its sight.

What I fear in it leaves it and the fear of it leaves me.

It sings and I hear its song.

After days of labor mute in my consternations,

I hear my song at last and I sing it.

As we sing,

The day turns,

The trees move.

So take a full deep breath into this radiant body of love.

One more deep breath into this radiant body of love.

And without losing this embodied mindfulness and loving awareness,

Just gently open the eyes coming back to this group together.

Thank you for practicing with me.

Thanks,

Dr.

Sapero.

I will have to call you Michael because I cannot keep up this formality.

Turns out Michael and I both cannot keep ourselves to under 15 minutes.

It is now the end of the presentation part.

To be fair with everyone else,

I will make an executive decision to make the question and answer section 15 minutes.

Those who want to stay will go to 845 Pacific time which is 15 minutes from now for questions and answers.

A few notes on questions and answers.

Generally when I have run these things before,

There are some questions that people ask that are on the order of do you know this person who does this work?

I should introduce you because you would like it.

Have you ever thought of doing this experiment?

Those are great and wonderful and much appreciated.

But better for sending to an email to either Michael or myself.

You can reach us both at gotilt.

Org in the contact form.

When you're asking questions in the chat window,

Consider checking with your future self and see is this a question that people who are watching the YouTube video and other people will benefit from?

In other words,

Is it a question that really is currently in the present moment percolating in your mind and curiosity?

That kind of thing is what we are going for here.

I hope I have not discouraged everyone from asking questions.

Please ask the question you want to ask and we can filter them.

Great.

We have a question.

I will not be saying people's names who ask questions because some people want to remain private.

Someone teaches a similar future self exercise in their practice and wants to have me explain the difference between the higher self and the future self.

I do not know enough to know if there is a difference.

I conceptualize them differently but other people will conceptualize them as the same.

The future self seems to me to be a more scientific term in the sense that we have a past self.

In other words,

We consider it adaptive to in our lives connect with our past selves.

In fact,

We consider it maladaptive if you wake up every morning and say,

Oh my gosh,

What is going on?

I do not know where I am and I do not have any memory of who I am and what is happening.

That is considered maladaptive.

However,

We tend not to emphasize the future self part.

I think of the future self as just the temporarily reverse version of our past connectivity.

The higher self is this new age concept.

I know what you mean when you are talking about it.

I associate it with in the psychological literature,

I associate it with the super conscious that Roberto talked about who was a student of Freud and said I am sick of all the pathology stuff.

I want to have a section of the psyche that is actually really helpful and guides people with wisdom.

He created this idea of the super conscious that guides people.

I think of that as the higher self.

I do think the super conscious,

If you want to believe in that as part of the psyche or name that as part of the psyche,

Can call people forward and act as a future self.

I think there is a lot of complexity there.

I am not sure how much the different constructs actually help people.

I find myself perched in my background in cognitive neuroscience and basic research and moving much towards application.

I find myself perched in this transitional or translational zone where I am not sure how much of a difference it makes.

If you help people by talking about the higher self,

Then keep doing that.

Maybe you might want to incorporate some of the hope workouts we are talking about over the course of this series into your practice and you can change the name to higher self if that is what reaches your people.

Frankly,

Who knows?

No one has figured out life and certainly not one thing works for everyone.

Is that vague and totally full of caveats enough for you?

Hey,

Michael,

Are you still unmuted?

No.

I will unmute you.

Am I here?

Do you hear me?

Yeah.

I just want to respond.

Yeah,

You want to respond to the last one.

Yeah,

Just just briefly,

For me as a non-dual meditation teacher and a Buddhist student teacher,

They are simultaneously existing.

We have to refine our humanness with speech,

Our right speech,

You know,

Looking into the future to see what would my wise future self tell me to do in this moment or how can I embody this wise future self that's in the future while underlying knowing we are already whole and unbroken even now,

Even then,

Even where we're coming from.

There's an unbroken chain of innate goodness that never leaves us and yet we're learning and growing as a human being toward the future.

So if you can have a robust healthy vision of a wise future,

Our loving self,

You can emulate her and him in the present moment.

Everything for me comes to the present moment.

I'm bringing my future self to the present moment,

Bringing him into my body so I can act and be like him because that's who I want to become while knowing underlying we have innate goodness that radiates at all times.

Cool.

Excellent.

Okay and there's another question I wanted to really quickly get to because it's a logistical question.

Is this an ongoing series?

Yes,

Michael and I have the response to this was so overwhelming that we decided to make this an ongoing series where we do a meditation time type thing,

A scientific blurb thing and question answers.

We'll try to do it every week and everyone on this list,

If you haven't received an email from me,

Shoot me an email through go tilt org and I'll put you on the list and you'll get an announcement about it.

So there's a there's a question,

Can you speak to being in the present and the present self and all that implies with a future self orientation?

Right,

So there's this idea of being in the present or the moment of now being special and being presenting is very important.

Being present is of course very important.

Getting this information right here about what it feels in our body and our minds and everything else,

Whatever you want to call it,

To be here is really important.

But so okay that's why I have my pearls out because I thought someone might ask this question so I never actually wear these pearls but they're great as a metaphor.

So this big pearl in the middle let's imagine that's the present.

This is our present moment.

It's surrounded by the past and the future moments going out like this and our we're always experiencing the now as the special thing that but it also we're also experiencing it moving along in time.

So now is special in that it's the only thing that we have evidence for ever is the now right that's very special.

And at the same time there has to be this relationship and and and this and so my experience is that by being more present to the now you also are somehow capable of being connected.

It's like if if I'm that linchpin if I'm that middle pearl then I also somehow over time and this also the pearls don't do this justice because it kind of has to move in time and space but anyway what happens is,

I'll throw the pearls away for a second,

If this is present,

This is the future,

This is the past,

It's like each moment becomes strengthened and through the strengthening of connecting to these other moments you the moment's start to drift away and you become the thread which is an extremely strong position to be in.

So I'm no longer dependent on each of those moments in my life to define who I am I'm actually I'm actually the string that connects them so it's like I'm the essence I'm no longer those objects.

It's a very powerful and sort of radical position to be in but it's delightful and very helpful.

Any comments on that Michael?

Yeah I mean we have language for it unity consciousness we have cosmic consciousness it's when you really become the thing that holds all of existence that we become the container for it which includes all moments past and present which is why it becomes so powerful because we're so tightly connected to who we think we are and we're kind of holding on desperately and bonded to usually well how we're suffering and when we see the greater bigger picture that we really truly are we can let go of the bonds to this tight self that we think we are and really experience a greater version of ourselves which we are in we're all connected in every single moment to past present future and to each other and to the earth and to the cosmos and whatever else it's all there but we are very limited because we believe we're just this thing going from backwards to this moment and all that stuff we've been through and it's hard to see the future but it's all it's all it's all here now and like I like what Julie said and once we expand it becomes a much more powerful stance if I am all of this and more yeah physicists talk about a world line you know the moment of our particle comes into comes into existence and the moment that it goes out of existence as if that's true is all this places in space-time where that particle was and so if you think of yourself as that particle you know from the moment of your birth to moment of your death and you're all of that that's that's much more powerful because you don't have to be everything all at once so today I'm scared but tomorrow I maybe have a different experience but if I'm all of that I get to be all of that stronger I want to get to the question here and specifically I want to get to it because I will out my mother for asking it I know she won't mind the question is so what's a false hope right could you have could you have a fantasy of your future self saying oh everything's wonderful and it's a lie and then you're disappointed so my experience with really going into a meditative state like the one Michael took us into and connecting with my future self is that it's never this never this experience of let me tell you all the prizes you've won it's just it's just love it's just this connection of just like when I was a little girl and that future self appeared she wouldn't she wasn't telling me all the things that were happening to me that were traumatic weren't happening she wasn't saying oh this is okay this is fine this is not a problem in fact she was saying this sucks this is hard you're gonna get through this it's gonna be okay but this is hard right now it makes sense that you're having a hard time it makes sense that you're in pain in other words it's a real connection this person's not that different from you that's why it's I think it very helpful if you're concerned about false hopes start by connecting if you do the hope homework start by making a hope workout for yourself that's literally five minutes in the future then move to ten minutes in the future and start to string it out the horizon Michael did you want to comment on that no I think that's I think what I found with all my patients myself in the groups is it's really love coming back at you it's like the father-mother we we always had or wish we had or within ourselves that wise kind of loving archetype that looks back and says you're going to be alright if here's the practices I always hear practices be patient you know hold tight you know find friends you know the future self is always telling me something that if I practice will lead me to that future place and it's usually wisdom speaking so I've never also seen something that shows me big houses and cars and go you're gonna make this happen it's usually when I'm struggling the future self going here's how you can get to this place and so I encourage all of you to do these meditations often because you're gonna get a stronger sense of your innate wisdom speaking to you from the future because it may be hard to access right now in the present when we're struggling and suffering so much or we're anxious or we're fearful it's hard to access what the future self can give us which is your innate wisdom back at you yeah and that made me reminded me of something Michaels and also someone asked how does love shape all of this so so just super quickly unconditional love is one of my research topics and what is it something that Michael researchers as well so we're both into it and and we both noticed that it's something that seems to I'm doing this with my hands to show that it's what am I trying to say with my hands to show that it's sort of down here it's like beyond it's sort of beneath the head but it's also beyond time and space it's beyond the separation that we have there's a you there's a me unconditional love transcends this there's a now there's a then unconditional love transcendence transcends this it's transcending separation in time and space so so it shapes all of it to answer the question of how does love shape this and when you're starting out with this the way Michael did that meditation where he looked backwards first and sent love is a very helpful way if you don't trust your future self to send you love like some people are in a relationship with their future self where they don't want to look and I get that because of their history and I have been in that place it really helps to just go oh I'm gonna go do a meditation where I said my past self love and then you see wait I'm the future self for that past and I sent me love therefore my future self is very much like me five minutes from now consent me love so you start to be the model for yourself of how to do it hmm cool mm-hmm all right there's other questions about how time works and all that stuff which low less applications oriented and very interesting more basic research oriented but that's more like physics stuff and I think we should leave that out I have us at about a minute left yeah I think we have I think we're done so I think we better say goodbye and let people have their days have wonderful yeah thank you all thank you everybody thank you we'll see you soon and I'll send this recording to everyone on the list

Reviews

I love the mix of science and meditation to give hope

That was very nice! This concept of future Self is new to me and wow! so powerful. I can’t wait to do more!

Exactly what I needed 🙏 A very insightful talk, completed with a few homework hope exercises and a guided group meditation. Thank you for the warm light you spread 😍🙏🌟

Thank you both for giving such tangible and easy to try steps to help ourselves cultivate hope now and into future.