The Audacity of Hope...

Audacity.  Shameless boldness.  Daring, with confident or arrogant disregard for conventional wisdom or other restrictions.

I've never really considered hope audacious, but perhaps it truly is.

You see, I'm hoping for some changes this year in my life as I concentrate on moving forward.  I've undertaken the task of examining my life - where I am, what I've accomplished as a wife, mother, daughter, professional, and perhaps more importantly, where I want to go and what I want to do with the time I've got left in this life.  I make no bones any longer about facing midlife head on and asking myself the difficult questions.  I'm generally happy and fairly settled in my life at this point, but there are these nagging unfulfilled goals and dreams that keep eating away at me.  It's time to do actually DO something about them...and it may well take some audacity to get them accomplished.

In Spanish, the verbs "to hope" and "to wait" are actually translated as the same word - esperar.  I like the concept that to hope is to patiently wait with a positive expectation that what you hope for will actually happen.  But sometimes, I think it's necessary to be a little bit more shamelessly bold about your hopes and work toward accomplishing them, and I believe that I am there in my journey. With the commitment this year to focus on taking my journey intentionally forward, I think it's time to have some audacity as I hope - to be willing to take some risks in order to see some dreams happen. 

Take my novel, for example.  I've been a writer for as long as I remember, and have a few finished novels sitting on my hard drive (and on some external drives, too...just in case the computer crashes!).  Will this be the year that I finally become audacious and work to get them published? Or better yet - will I just publish them myself, with some "arrogant disregard for conventional wisdom and other restrictions"?  I hope that at the end of the year, the answer to these questions is yes, 2015 was the year that Angie became audacious...and a published author!  That is one of the bigger goals that has yet to be accomplished, but there are others.  Some of them are relational, others professional.  All of them are still out there, waiting for me to make the decision to go for it - or not. 

Being audacious means risking failure, which has generally held me back from audacity for most of my life. I've never really embraced failure.  In fact, I very often have loathed it.  I've never truly understood that failure gets you closer to success, but it's coming into focus for me as I read and study more.  Failing means I'm out there...doing something!  And at this point, I wonder if it's finally true for me that doing something, even if it fails, is more worthwhile than risking nothing? 

So, with all due respect to our current president, from whom I'm stealing the phrase...I have decided that I WILL have the Audacity of Hope in 2015.  This year, I will back up my positive expectation with some shameless boldness and work toward some of these dreams and goals.  Who knows how it will all come out?  But I can't help but believe that it will bring me more satisfaction than frustration along the way.  Either way, it's time for me to DO SOMETHING.

Moving forward...

Angie :-)