Hope and the 2009 job prospects

There is much fear, and justifiably so, of the coming wave of layoffs across America in the first and second quarters we are looking to now. I keep telling my candidates: stay open, be flexible, keep learning something new, something that stretches you, keep connecting to other people, even if you don't know why or how they might help you. See first how you might help them.

I was doing my Christmas reading today and came upon this quote form Henri J, M. Louwen's book: With Open Hands. It says what I want to say but way better:

I see hope as an attitude where everything stays open before me. Not that I don't think of my future in those moments, but I think of it in an entirely different way. Daring to stay open to whatever will come to me today, tomorrow, two months from now or a year from now---that is hope. To go fearlessly into things without knowing how they'll turn out, to keep on going, even when something doesn't work the first time, to have trust in whatever you're doing---that is living with hope.

I have been on the brink of failure so many times now, I can't count. Change itself is the death of the old and the birth of the new, but perhaps we wait too long on death and fail to see the birth. Or we fail to anticipate the coming birth. This anticipation is the cradle of hope, not the blind helpless state, but the energy that supplies the little individual to see opportunity and run with it, for the greater good.  That is living with hope.