How I Find Hope in Difficult Times

Hope can be a difficult thing to hold onto — especially when the world feels heavy.

We see so much pain and uncertainty around us. We hear about conflicts that seem impossible to resolve, challenges that seem too large to overcome, and problems that will require the patience and courage of many generations.

At times like these, I find myself returning to a question I’ve asked throughout my life:

Where do we find hope?

I have discovered that the answer is rarely in the places we expect.

Hope is not always found in great victories or dramatic moments. More often, I find it in quiet places — in the persistence of nature, in the determination of young people, and in the stories we tell one another.

Finding Hope in the Natural World

Nature has always been one of my greatest teachers.

I’ve spent much of my life exploring wild places, and one thing continues to amaze me: nature does not give up easily.

A forest can be damaged by a fire or storm, yet life begins returning almost immediately. A fallen tree becomes a place of shelter and nourishment. A seed can remain hidden underground for years, waiting for the right conditions to begin growing.

The natural world understands something we often forget.

Renewal takes time.

We live in a culture that celebrates quick answers and immediate results. But nature works according to a different rhythm. Healing happens gradually. Growth happens quietly. Change often begins before we can see it.

I find great comfort in that.

The challenges facing our world are real. But so is the remarkable ability of life to adapt, recover, and begin again.

Finding Hope in Young People Who Care

Another place I find hope is in young people.

Over the years, I have had the privilege of meeting many young people who are working to make the world a better place. They have reminded me again and again that courage is not something reserved for adults, famous leaders, or people with special power.

Sometimes courage belongs to a young person who simply notices a need and decides to respond.

That belief was one of the reasons I founded the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes, named in honor of my mother. She was a teacher for many years, and she understood something I have come to believe deeply: young people are not just the future. They are part of the present.

She taught for many years. She cared about her students the way some people care about the land: deeply, without expecting anything back. She would have been embarrassed by the prize bearing her name, and that is exactly why I gave it to her.

Every year, the Prize honors 25 young people who have found their own way to make the world better. One of them, a teenager in Montana, installed solar panels throughout her entire community. Another founded a school in Africa. A group of New York City kids called Garden Angels did something that turned out to be about far more than gardens — it was about keeping other kids alive. None of them are household names. They do what they do because it needs doing, and most of them, if you asked, wouldn’t describe any of it as heroic.

Whenever the world feels particularly heavy to me, I read their stories. Every single time, I come away less convinced that the world is as broken as it seemed an hour before.

One story I return to often doesn’t come from the Prize. It comes from The Hero’s Trail, and it’s the story of Wilma Rudolph. She was born in rural Tennessee as the 20th child in a poor Black family. As a toddler, she was struck by scarlet fever, double pneumonia, and polio — all at once. The doctors told her family she would never walk. She spent years in a metal leg brace, watching her siblings play outside without her. She had something the doctors hadn’t accounted for: she kept trying, year after year, until one day she wasn’t just walking. At the 1960 Olympics in Rome, Wilma Rudolph became the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Games.

The Quiet Power of Small Acts

When I think about hope, I used to picture it too grandly. Some blazing bonfire visible for miles, some enormous gesture that announces itself to the world.

A small flickering candle flame, a single torch adding light to a darkened space. That’s closer to what I’ve actually seen.

Mother Teresa was asked once, late in her life, how she had managed to do so many great things. She answered without hesitation: “I have done no great things. None. But I have done many small things with great love.”

A quiet conversation with someone who needed to be heard. Showing up when it would have been easier not to. None of it looks, from the outside, like a world-changing act. But I’ve stopped expecting it to.

The ancient Incas read their constellations in the dark spaces between the stars — the shapes that most of us pass over without noticing. Stars only become brilliant against the dark.

There’s a quote from the Buddha that I’ve carried with me for a long time. It is my all-time favorite quote, which is saying quite a lot: “Make of your life a light.”

What I keep returning to is the first word. Make. A verb, a call to action. It says: you have the capacity to do this. That’s the whole presumption. It doesn’t tell you how, or on what scale, or in which direction. What you do with it is entirely your own.

What I’ve come to believe is that hope is less a feeling than a habit. Something you practice in small ways, more or less every day, whether or not it seems to be accomplishing anything.

Why Stories Give Us Hope

Stories have always been one of the ways I make sense of the world.

The stories that stay with us are rarely the ones where everything goes perfectly. They are the ones where characters face hardship, uncertainty, and loss—and still find a reason to continue.

There is a scene near the end of T.H. White’s The Once and Future King that has never left me. I first read it under an old oak tree in the hills outside Oxford, and I have returned to it many times since — especially when writing about Merlin.

King Arthur sits alone in his tent. The battle for Camelot is lost. His Round Table is destroyed, his love is gone, his dream of a just society is in ruins. He weeps in the dark.

And then, just outside the tent, he notices a young boy holding a torch.

He calls the boy inside. The boy straightens up and announces that he has come to fight. For Camelot. He is willing to die for it.

Arthur shakes his head. “No. You will not fight.”

The boy protests. The king is firm.

“This is my command,” Arthur tells him. “You will run behind the lines tomorrow. You will live to be an old man. And in your long life, you will tell everyone you meet that for a brief, shining moment, there was a place, an idea, called Camelot. And so maybe, in some future time, that place might come alive again.”

Then he draws his sword, tells the boy to kneel, and asks his name.

“Tom,” the boy answers.

Arthur taps the boy’s shoulders. “Well now, Tom, the light bringer. Go forth in your life and share that light wherever you go. Tell stories, Tom. Stories that will kindle the same light in the hearts of others.”

I’ll confess that sharing a name with that boy has given me a particular fondness for this scene over the years.

Arthur never did win his battle. But he made sure the idea survived it.

Carrying Hope Forward

Finding hope in difficult times doesn’t mean pretending that the world’s challenges are small. It means remembering that difficulty has never been the end of the story.

A forest doesn’t remain forever changed by a storm. A seed doesn’t know how long it has waited beneath the soil before it begins to grow. Life has a remarkable way of continuing, even when the path forward is hidden from view.

People are much the same.

Throughout history, in moments of uncertainty and hardship, there have always been people who choose to care, create, and help. They carry something forward larger than themselves, often without knowing how far their actions will reach.

That is where I find hope: in the young person who believes a better world is possible, in the storyteller who keeps old wisdom alive, and in the quiet acts of kindness that may never receive recognition but still change the world around them.

Hope isn’t something we need to wait for. It is already present in countless small moments, growing wherever people choose courage, compassion, and connection.

When we take the time to notice those moments, we discover that hope has been with us all along.