Hope is a thing no one can take from you. Only you can give it away.

I heard those words in a lecture hall at Kent State, years ago, spoken by Elie Wiesel himself. It was one of those evenings that stays with you long after the room empties out. He didn’t talk about hope like a feeling. He talked about it like a fact he’d witnessed firsthand. He said that on some days, in the camps, hope was as small as the soup having a little more flavor than usual. He said the ones who survived were often the ones who held onto something impossibly tender in the middle of horror: people who fell in love, who got married, even there. Hearing him speak that night didn’t just teach me about hope. It rearranged what I thought hope was for.

I find mine in smaller places now, though I’ve never forgotten that lecture. In the flowers blooming on my patio, opening a little more each morning like they have somewhere to be. In the way the sun sets slow and gold on a summer evening, like it’s in no hurry to leave either. In the people I’ve gathered close and the ones I’m still meeting: friends, family, neighbors, strangers who become something more.

Hope shows up when I nurture my small community and when I reach past it, too, volunteering, learning from people whose lives look nothing like mine, standing in solidarity across our differences for the sake of our environment, our health, our well-being. It shows up in education. The more I learn, the more I believe I can actually do something with what I know, on a small scale or a large one, it doesn’t matter. Learning is a kind of proof that things can change.

But if you want to know where I really learned hope, where I mean I learned it in my bones, before I had language for it, I have to tell you about the Browns.

Sundays With Dad

Every Sunday of my childhood, my dad and I watched the Browns. If the game was blacked out on the local channel, he’d find a workaround: put a different game on the TV, muted, and turn on the radio so we could still hear our game called play by play. Two screens and a radio, just to make sure the Browns were somehow in the room.

Any Browns fan can tell you what hope costs. There’s always next year isn’t a joke here, it’s the actual operating philosophy of the franchise. Every brutal loss, every disappointing season, came with its own quiet renewal. We’ll get a good draft pick. New coaching. New management. This is the year it turns around.

My dad never lost that. Down two scores with two minutes left, he’d still be leaning forward. There was always a path, an onside kick, a turnover, a miracle drive, however long the odds. He held onto it anyway. Not because he thought it was likely. Because hope, for a Browns fan, isn’t about likely. It’s a discipline. You practice it whether or not it pays off, because the practice is the point.

I share that same love of the team with my son now. But my dad passed away a year before my son was born, so the three of us never got to sit in a room together and watch a game the way my dad and I used to. I think about that a lot, the Sunday that never happened, the two screens and the radio my son never got to see.

What I Carry Forward

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: my dad didn’t just hand me a football team. He handed me a way of holding on. Hope, whether the season ends in heartbreak or not, that’s what he was really teaching me, all those Sundays, without either of us knowing it.

So now when I watch a game with my son, I’m not just watching the Browns. I’m passing along the same stubborn, ridiculous, necessary belief that showed up in our living room every week: that the long shot is still worth leaning into, that next year is always worth believing in, that hope isn’t something you wait to feel. It’s something you practice, on purpose, until it becomes who you are.

I carry that same practice into my work, too. As a therapist, I’m honored to help bring hope to others, not just through skills and treatment modalities, but through compassion and real life experience. Watching a client find their own hope, build it back up piece by piece until it’s theirs again, is one of the biggest rewards of what I do.

That’s the kind of hope I want to keep giving away.

Thank you to Kit’s Writing Services for helping me clarify my message.