Honorable Mention - Diane Kendall Stevens, Age 51

Welcome to our Optimistic Essay category. Here you will find the $1,000 winning contest essay, 5 finalist essays and 15 honorable mention essays and a growing list of hand-picked select essays that readers submitted during our "Why Are You Optimistic About the Future?" contest. This is a special category dedicated to those who took the time to share their touching stories and bright perspectives with HappyNews.com.

I am optimistic about our shared future. All around me are powerful indicators of wellness and improvement, a world buzzing with educational, technological and medical breakthroughs, a world in ascendancy. This celebration is not with numbness to the sufferings of the world, the natural disasters, war, disease and crime beamed to us in microseconds. To do so would be insensitive and uncaring, or worse yet, neglectful and cruel. Nonetheless, I am optimistic. As an education researcher, I observe committed professionals, theorists and practitioners, implementing our best collaborative strategies in cognition and learning. They are committed—with their sleep-deprived lives—to improving minds and lives. Their resolve in no way negates harsh realities in those lives. Hours do not pass that we all do not involuntarily shudder at stories edited to remind us of our—my—vulnerability. The children's images hurt most: cries for lost parents, crippled and diseased bodies, or mug shots of perpetrators and betrayers rip at our most primitive, protective instincts. Still, I believe. In the midst of this relentless suffering, in response to it, because of it, I believe. It is my own best return on this gift of life in all its irrepressible and inexpressible joy and grief, a belief honed and forged in the simultaneity of both realities.

My belief in the future is a living hope, and like all living things, exists and grows as it is nurtured and protected. It requires others—community—for survival. Our world as never before embraces this interconnectedness and tolerance. Today, a quiet but exciting movement in education and psychology/sociology is research in paradigm-shifting "relational theory." Based on early feminist psychological theory, it urges us to shift from notions of hierarchicy to more collaborative ones. Its compelling conclusions take a karate chop, or better yet, create a dynamic dialogue with older systems that pit us against each other, such as later Freudian psychology or self-fulfillment strategies that end with the individualized and solitary self. The ability to form and move in relationships, and therefore to learn to repair them, moves us all, male and female, into healthier places. This body of research, worked out in long hours of observation and synthesis, provides reliability for what we have all sensed but have hesitated to acknowledge: we are stronger together than alone. These underpinning theories move us all toward a healthier, collaboratively-constructed future.

A living hope requires that we live life on its terms. Each day millions of us act live with great respect and charity toward each other. Nurses tend our ill late into the night. Scientists intensify research into creating healthier, sustainable life. Public servants—our police and emergency forces and too-often condemned political workers—give unselfishly, often at personal cost. Our communities are full of neighbors who help out when needed, share a meal, provide babysitting, or help with a fallen tree or a broken heart. We are people who give deeply. Many of us also hurt deeply and display the affects of those broken hearts and broken bodies. Illness, poverty and wrong-doing coincide with the impetus toward healing in frustrating and often illogical togetherness. Despite our best efforts, it is an imperfect world. This reality gets us up in the morning, hitting the alarm button and the shower to face the tasks at hand, and always in a relational context.

Such living hope requires places of sanctuary and nurture for each one of us. Many of us need the affirmation that life is indeed worth living. We find this in group affiliation, altruistic gestures, reading, tending the care of ourselves and others, and caretaking our earth. Some find it in spiritual practice, in song, in creation of other art forms, in appreciation of art forms, in laughter or in learning. We grow because others choose to develop their skills and to share them.

Why am I optimistic about tomorrow? Because I have fought for hope in it. And because I know darkness too well: I acknowledge its existence and its ability to turn us too easily from hope. My own parents, both teachers, struggled with severe mental illness. My father, a high-school principal and teacher-of-the-year, lost that fight. My brother now battles his own schizophrenia in a complex and research-needy medical system. In that reality, mixed with love and suffering, I found that together we are stronger than the darkness. Deep connections strengthens us—and direct us if we dare to trust them. I have sought answers and found them—in people, in the renewing earth, in my research and work with youth, and in my own spiritual practice that has taught me thankfulness and to look for "that which is pure and noble."

I believe we are called into community—as we can best understand it—to save us all. Some of us are called to repair the effects of darkness by becoming healers. Some of us are builders and administrators. Some of us are teachers. Some of us are researchers and thinkers. Some of us are simply wonderful neighbors and friends. And some of us have a special role—to be bearers of faith and belief. It is our gift to remind others to turn from the darkness and take strength: "Look, the light is rising on tomorrow."