Baseball, Birding, and the Healing Balm of Hope

 

“It ain’t over till it’s over!”

The time-tested battle cry is never truer than in baseball. I can’t even count the times my team rallied back bottom of the ninth, two outs, one man on. And I watch straight though until that last out is called because, in baseball, there is always hope: hope that my team will come from behind, hope that I’ll see something new (I’m still waiting to see a live triple play), and if my team doesn’t make it to post-season, hope for next year. 

Birdwatching is like baseball as it, too, fills me with hope. I’ve backyard bird-watched for years but am still new to the deliberate world of birding. This is the world where I traipse through woods, cross meadows, and straddle creeks to catch sight of something I’ve never seen before: a new species, a strange activity, an unprecedented flock. 

Even though I average 7 poor days of birding for every great day,  I am undeterred. Why? Hope. 

Tomorrow  holds the possibility of being better. The odds are in my favor. And I’m filled with hope, the healing balm that soothes the pain of losing. Or of losing out.

There have only been a few times I recall feeling hopeless. The most devastating, the time which cut the deepest, was losing my son. For over two years I – our whole family – hoped that chemo would work. We hoped the cancer would go into remission. We hoped for a cure. New remedies were being discovered every day. Just hang on, we whispered, until that next breakthrough. And then, sadly, one day it was over. And I had to do two terrible things: say goodbye and let go of hope.

The ancient Greeks understood hope’s magic. In the Myth of Pandora’s Box, a young woman is given a box and told under no circumstance is she to open it. Curiosity, of course, gets the better of her and she opens the box only to unleash all the world’s ills, mischief, and sorrows. Once released, they could not be re-contained. But when she looked close, in the very bottom of the box, there was one small, significant thing that remained: Hope.

Not only is hope healthy, it gives me reason to get out of bed. And who doesn’t need that these days?

I cannot replace what is gone forever, but I can – and do – hope for new things, good things, things that heal me like baseball, birding and the balm of hope itself.

 

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It’d be hell if there weren’t any birds -- and I’m not the only one who thinks so. In the old Japanese culture of Ainu on the island of Hokkaidu, one of their concepts of hell was the exact world in which they lived – but with no birds at all. No birds, and no hope of birds.