Sometime back, I had written a post called “The Hopeful Optimist.” It is AVAILABLE HERE. I have always liked the article. However, I wish I had seen the following quote, before I wrote it.

Hope is by no means the exclusive preserve of religious people or the Christian community, but a universal phenomenon. As a reaction to the challenges and difficulties of life, hope exists at a pre-reflective level of human awareness and activity. Hope, as some theologians have rightly pointed out, belongs to the very essence of the human condition, and is the presupposition and motivation of everything we do. As an “outlook and attitude that influences and shapes and colours all human experiences and activities,” hope is thus essential for human flourishing. In order to attain a proper understanding of hope, a distinction must be made between hope and optimism. Optimism is the naïve and blind acquiescence to the principle of human progress that ignores the ambiguities of our world and the ubiquity of pain, suffering, and evil. Optimism refuses to acknowledge the vulnerability of the human enterprise, preferring to embrace a triumphalism that has lost touch with reality. Hope, in contrast, confronts the world as it is: it embraces a stark realism, struggles with the ambiguity of life, and “responds to it by taking up a particular posture of imagining new possibilities and other alternatives, inspired by the pulses of human experience.”

“Eschatology and Hope in Asia” by Roland Chia. In Asian Christian Theology: Evangelical Perspectives, edited by Gener, Timoteo D.; Pardue, Stephen T.. (pp. 168-169). Langham Creative Projects. Kindle Edition.