Hope is a beautiful thing

 

Hope is a beautiful thing to find in art or stories or music. It is often

a surprise moment, like in The Shawshank Redemption when the

poster of Raquel Welch has been pulled off the wall in Andy's prison cell

Or in The Sound of Music when Captain von Trapp switches from

repressed widower to singing father in the space of a single scene.

It is often subtle, but you know it when you feel it. Like when

'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' effortlessly goes up a whole octave

within the word 'somewhere', jumping clean over seven natural

keys - an actual musical rainbow - before landing on the eighth.

Hope always involves soaring and reaching. Hope flies. The

the thing with feathers, as Emily Dickinson said.

People often imagine it is hard to feel hopeful when times are

tough, yet I tend to think the opposite. Or at least, hope is the thing

we most want to cling to in periods of despair or worry. I think

that it's no coincidence that 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow', one of

the most bittersweet yet hopeful songs in the world, a song that has

topped polls as the greatest song of the twentieth century, was

written by Harold Arlen and Yip Hamburg for The Wizard of Oz in

one of the bleakest years in human history: 1939. Harold wrote the

music, while Yip penned the words. Harold and Yip themselves

are no strangers to suffering. Yip had seen the horrors of the First

World War and was left bankrupt following the crash of 1929. As for

old, who would become known for his hopeful octave-leaping

was born with a twin brother who sadly died in infancy. Aged

en, Harold fled his Jewish Orthodox parents and pursued?

dern musical path. And let's not forget these were two Jewish

musicians writing inarguably the most hopeful song ever written, all while Adolf Hitler was triggering war and antisemitism was on the

rise.

To feel hope you don't need to be in a great situation. You just need

to understand that things will change. Hope is available to all. You

don't need to deny the reality of the present to have hope,

you just need to know the future is uncertain, and that life contains

light as well as dark. We can have our feet right here where we are,

while our minds can hear another octave, right over the rainbow.

We can be half inside the present, and half inside the future. Hal in

Kansas, half in Oz.