Dear Authors,
Authoring is no longer about hiding behind the laptop, writing books for a publisher that has given you deadlines. Your readers are no longer content to just read your book. They want to know who you are, what your values are and most of all they want to be inspired by you. Sometimes, that means having to come out of your comfort zone to speak to your wider audience.
A few weeks ago, I had to do just that. With an invitation to talk about HOPE on an online platform called HIT talks, I found myself having to come up with an 8 minute talk about why HOPE is the reason most of whatever we do, is able to happen. I thought I’d share some of what I said on my first blog, which happens to come on the first day of the last month of the year, December and I am doing this with the objective of encouraging you to keep HOPE alive and burning within as you prepare to enter a new year. Here goes:
During my life, I have had many encounters that evoke hope, inspiration and transformation. I have lived many instances which had the power to destroy my very being but it was always HOPE that kept me from crumbling, pushing me to move forward, egging me on to defy the odds and shape my life and myself successfully.
When I was little, how concerned my parents were worried that I was a little too short in height. The elders would waylay their fears, telling them that DYNAMITE CAME IN SMALL PACKAGES, a commonly used idiom back then. Today it has evolved and I hear that it is now GOOD THINGS THAT COME IN SMALL PACKAGES but my personal favourite is IT’S THE SMALL CHILLIES THAT ARE REALLY HOT.
So to me, although HOPE, too, is a small word, it exists within every human being who is born with a best-selling story within and will always have the power to replicate meaningful inspiration and transformation globally because:
- Is it not with hope that every person falls in love and wishes that the other person would reciprocate, validate, and cherish them forever? And if that doesn’t happen then,
- It is surely hope that is entwined even in the most disastrous relationships in which stories end with renewed hope to love and be loved again.
- It is palpable in stories where parents sit day and night alongside ailing children praying for miraculous interventions, willing their children to overcome their battles. The same parents accept their losses, albeit painful, with the hope that someday they will all meet again in the hereafter.
- It must surely be stories filled with hope when women who have no outlet from abusive lives, trapped and mercilessly treated, yearn still for the freedom that keeps them alive.
- It truly is hope when people facing terror and injustices pray fervently that it will end with the coming of a single dawn that will give them gifts of peace, harmony and unity.
- Is it not hope that drives children who are deprived of a proper education to beat the odds and become what they innately know they are meant to be? and
- Are tears of despair not tears of hope also in which faith and patience are demonstrated waiting for something better to come to fruition?
- Hope is evident when darkness eclipses into our lives yet we find the strength, seek the clarity and hold the resolve to plough ahead with solutions for transformation.
- Hope is still alive and well in the face of the Corona Virus that keeps so many of us anxious for various reasons. So it, it must be hope also that keeps us vigilant for news of vaccines that maybe approved.
- Hope is at the heart of every author’s story, journalists’ article, and social media influencers posts that their books and articles are masterstrokes of truth and integrity.
- Despite the glaring and disastrous effects of false news, you cannot deny that it is hope that drives the efforts made by truth seekers to reveal what is honest and encourage everyone to speak their truth.
- Hope still manages to exist within every terminally ill patient, their families and friends. It is hope that keeps scientist busy trying to find new ways to keep our eco-systems alive.
I said in the introduction that I believe that everyone of us is born with a best-selling story within. Every story of hope has the kind of power many of us have not fully come to realise as yet, perhaps because we have not been raised in positive and hopeful environments or maybe its just easier to use hopelessness and helplessness as an excuse not to strive beyond our comfort zones. But, I humbly implore you to let the dynamism of this small word, H-O-P-E, infuse within.
If you saw hope as I see hope, then you will behold it in the role of a leader, a leader who when it is released into life and living, spreads inspiration and transformation organically and exponentially. In fact, I put it to you that without hope, there can never be inspiration and transformation.
Let’s begin 2021 with renewed hope for everything that we aspire to.
Keep smiling shining and writing!
