“Hope is not an emotion. Hope is a discipline. It is the stubborn, grinding work of locating the coordinates of dignity in the middle of the disaster. It is the widow who packs six lunches when she wants to curl up and die. It is the man who rebuilds the porch even though he knows the snow will crush it again in ten years.”Samuel Walker · Peter James Stouffer
He pointed the hickory staff at Elias like he was marking a property line.
What Samuel refuses is the idea that hope is something you feel before you act: a warmth that arrives before the work begins.
He names it in bodies instead. A widow. Six lunches. A porch that will be crushed by snow again. The discipline is that you do it anyway.