Sundays 40–42: Spot of Hope

October 4, 11, and 18, 2026

Three Sundays have passed since my last entry, and I did not write about them as they happened. I want to gather them now, because looking back, I can see the same thread running through all three: a stubborn, quiet possibility that kept showing up when I was not looking for it.

Daniel Goleman (1995) argues that emotional intelligence is partly the ability to notice our own emotional states and to shift them, rather than being carried along by them. I have been practicing this more than I expected. Some mornings the heaviness of the dissertation work and the many moving parts of the coming months sat on my chest. On those mornings, what helped was not pretending the weight was not there. It was naming it, and then turning to whatever small thing in front of me was still alive. Goleman’s point, as I take it, is that attention is the first lever we have. Where we place our attention shapes what we are able to feel next.

Malcolm Gladwell (2000, 2005) has written about the ways that small, unnoticed shifts can tip a whole system toward a new state, and about the way our first, rapid readings of a situation often hold more truth than we credit. I think of that when I look back at these three Sundays. None of them, taken alone, was dramatic. Yet together they formed a pattern, and the pattern tipped. A walk that I nearly skipped. A conversation that turned out to matter more than I had planned for. A quiet decision to keep going. Gladwell’s work reminds me that possibility often arrives in small, almost ordinary increments, and that we notice it only in hindsight, when the pattern has already formed.

Louise Hay (1984) built much of her work on the conviction that our inner dialogue shapes our experience, and that we can gently, deliberately change the stories we tell ourselves. I have long found her approach a little too breezy for the hard days. But I have also found that her central invitation holds up: when I deliberately choose a more open sentence to begin my day, the day tends to receive it. On these three Sundays, I started saying a simple line over my coffee, something like “there is room here for something good.” Some days I did not believe it. Still, I said it, and by the end of the week I could point to the things that proved it true.

What I am left with is this. The spot of hope is not a place we reach once and then keep. It is more like a habit of looking. Goleman invites us to look inward at what we feel. Gladwell invites us to look for the small shift that is already underway. Hay invites us to look at the words we are using to describe what we see. Together, they point toward the same practice: staying alert to possibility, even when the evidence is thin, and noticing the moment it appears.

So this is my celebration. Forty, forty-one, and forty-two were not dramatic Sundays, but they were full of possibility, and I found the hope in them when I was ready to see it. I invite you to look for your own spot this week. You may find it in the place you least expected.

References

Gladwell, M. (2000). The tipping point: How little things can make a big difference. Little, Brown.

Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking. Little, Brown.

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. Bantam Books.

Hay, L. L. (1984). You can heal your life. Hay House.