The Absurdity of Hope
(or The Legend of Kevin Robinson, Patron Saint of Stubborn Hope)
Have you heard the legend of Kevin Robinson?
Middle-aged martial artist.
Heart full of hope.
Knees full of cortisone and the echoes of past mistakes.
He entered an open Karate tournament.
He trained for this tournament like a man on a mission—or at least, a man full of nostalgia and something to prove.
Sure, he was out of shape.
His memory of the moves was more interpretive dance than precision.
And his knees? They made a whistling sound when he sat down that baffled both medicine and wind instruments.
But Kevin had something the others didn’t:
A huge heart.
Literally. It was enlarged—contributing to his sleep apnea, poor cardio, and his tendency to believe in miracles.
That heart was also full of boyhood dreams, untethered passion, and a middle-aged compulsion to prove he still had it.
So when he found his old black belt tucked in the back of the closet a few months ago, it felt like a sign. He wasn’t done. He had to go the distance.
His kids were in the bleachers. His wife packed electrolytes. His therapist was cautiously optimistic.
The kids made signs for him. Glitter-dipped masterpieces that lit up the room: “Go get ‘em Dad,” “Kick the competition,” and “Get the most points and win” (his third child was a bit more literal than poetic). Most impressive was Kevin Jr.’s sign: “Super Dad,” complete with a hand-drawn Superman logo. It was off-center, slightly smudged, and utterly perfect.
Kevin saw that sign and felt like a superhero. He didn’t care about the odds. He was doing this for Junior.
He believed in the power of hope.
The power of family.
The power of last-minute stretching.
He had Rocky music in his ears and Tiger Balm on every joint that could legally be oiled in public.
He was ready. He was going to triumph.
He stepped onto the mat like a warrior—like Rocky Balboa entering the ring.
Except it wasn’t a ring. It was a taped-off square in a high school gym that smelled like liniment and crushed dreams.
And then he walked out: Kevin’s opponent.
He looked like he’d been sculpted out of a CrossFit gym by angry Norse gods.
He was 23. Six feet tall. A black belt in multiple arts. Built like a protein shake that lifts weights.
Kevin didn’t flinch.
He bowed.
Thor bowed back.
The match began.
There was tension.
Focus.
Mutual respect.
And then, within four seconds, Kevin was kicked clean out of the ring.
Not metaphorically.
Not emotionally.
Literally. Out. Of. The. Ring.
He flew backwards like a human paper airplane and landed somewhere near the judge’s table and a platter of sad orange slices.
People rushed to help. His children gasped. One dad in the audience whispered,
“Was that Kevin Robinson?”
So here’s the question:
What did Kevin think was going to happen?
Did he think hope was going to bend the laws of physics?
That a pure heart could neutralize a spinning back kick?
This is where we begin:
With the beautiful, ridiculous, absurd belief that hope will always carry us through.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it carries us directly into a folding table.
We talk about hope like it’s sunshine and inspiration.
But most of the time, it’s not.
To deny reality isn’t hope. It’s denial.
Most of the time, hope is gritty. Quiet. Bruised.
It shows up with ice packs and humility and a willingness to lose on purpose
because something deeper is at stake than just the outcome.
When hope is only tied to outcomes, it can start to feel dangerous.
It sounds like: “What if I get my hopes up and fail?”
Or, “Wouldn’t it hurt more if I believed and it didn’t work out?”
And so, to protect ourselves, we stop hoping—not because we’ve given up, but because we’re afraid of what it might cost.
And the reality is that fear isn’t wrong.
You can hope and still fail.
Which is why hope is so absurd.
It asks so much of you, without any promises or guarantees, kind of like a gym membership, investing in Crypto, or parenting.
Yet, if it only showed up when the odds looked good, it wouldn’t be hope.
It’d be calculated strategy. Or branding. Or denial in a clever outfit.
So, yes—Kevin flew. But what was really lifting him?
Not his quads. Not the Tiger Balm.
Something else.
Something quiet, invisible, and impossibly stubborn.
And so we ask:
What exactly is hope?
We invoke it in therapy rooms, support groups, whispered prayers, and sometimes spotlit on TED Talk stages. But in the psychological literature, the definition of hope is still slippery. What we know for sure is that it matters.
In fact, my own research has shown that hope is one of the strongest predictors of mental health, addiction recovery, and long-term resilience. When people have hope, they’re more likely to persevere, to heal, to survive.
And my work is just one small entry in humanity’s long and tangled love affair with hope. Psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, nurses, poets, and politicians—we’ve all tried to name it, define it, bottle it, or sing about it.
Dickinson gave it feathers:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops – at all …
And that is what it feels like, doesn’t it?
Not a roadmap. Not a weapon.
But a song that won’t stop singing regardless of how noisy or quiet the world gets.
Even when we’ve forgotten the tune ourselves.
Hope is there.
Thomas Merton once wrote:
“You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going.
What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.”
I believe that the mystics understood that hope isn’t clarity.
It’s fidelity. Presence. Trust in motion.
In psychology, the prevailing models (like Snyder’s) define hope as a combination of agency (the belief that you can act) and pathways (the ability to imagine routes forward).
It’s a helpful model because it insists hope can be taught.
But it also assumes that a path is visible. That we can think our way toward it.
So what happens when the path disappears?
When there is no clear route forward? When you look to the horizon and all you see is just fog, failure, or a thousand miles of resistance?
That’s when another kind of hope emerges.
A kind that isn’t cognitive. It’s spiritual.
Civil rights movements don’t march forward because the odds look good.
They move because they are pulled by something deeper.
They walk into fire hoses, tear gas, and lynching threats with more than just agency.
They walk with sight beyond sight—a hope rooted in spirit, not just in strategy.
In one of our studies, we asked participants to meditate using a centering practice based on Centering Prayer. No coaching. No positive thinking. Just… silence. Presence. Listening. And what we found was remarkable: even without rational evidence, hope increased.
They weren’t told to think their way to hope. They were invited to be with themselves, and with something more. To sit in stillness with what they believed was most sacred.
This kind of hope doesn’t always show up in surveys. It’s not always rational.
But it moves us. And sometimes, it saves us.
It’s the kind of hope you feel in your chest when you see an elder marching slowly down the street with a protest sign in one hand and a cane in the other.
It’s the hope in a voice cracking through a bullhorn.
In tired feet that keep walking anyway.
In someone who stands up again, even after being knocked flat by the world.
Does it always get us the outcomes we want?
I don’t know. Maybe. It might.
But hope is bigger than outcomes.
Hope is a relationship.
It’s the relationship we have with our own lives—our refusal to disappear from our circumstances.
It’s the quiet insistence that we still matter. That others still matter.
That showing up still matters.
And sometimes, it starts with a middle-aged man flying out of a karate ring.
With glitter signs waving.
With kids running up to hug him, win or lose.
With a body bruised and a heart still wide open.
Kevin didn’t win.
But he showed up.
And maybe that’s the quiet miracle of hope.
That even after the fall, the failure, the folding table—we return.
We carry glitter signs and aching joints and still believe something is worth it.
Not because we’re certain.
But because something deeper whispers:
You’re still here.
And hope?
Maybe that’s just the soul, staying in relationship—and valuing itself enough to keep showing up.
If you are interested in a meditation to help arouse hope in you, might I recommend Centering Prayer (which is the same meditative practice we used in our research). Learn more here: https://cac.org/daily-meditations/centering-prayer-2018-12-12/ or watch the following similar practice from the Center for Action and Contemplation: