“Every day, we hear about ‘hopes’ on morning TV for the weather, the stock market, the sports team du jour, and every night they reflect it back to us in their evening edition,” writes “Kindness” columnist ANTONIO DI DIO.

AS a teenager, my cousin Sylvia was always terribly hopeful of getting straight hair and fitting into the tightest jeans on sale at the markets in our town.

“It’s the hope that kills you” is a line quoted from the ancient Greeks right through the ages to the modern Wallabies fan. It applied to her, too.

Every Friday night before she went out, her sisters would iron her hair while I translated the lyrics to the pop songs on the radio, from ELO to the Bee Gees. 

Then commenced a process that confirmed Einstein’s views that the laws of physics were not immutable and that light could bend. All three girls finished school at the end of year 4 but knew enough about solid objects and the sub-atomic particle equations of cotton molecules that teenager E (Sylvia) lying on the bed with size 8 fake Levis at her knees, with teenagers C (Maria-Teresa) and M (Loredana) on either side of her pulling at different angles and Loredana being younger but twice as strong, could get those slinky things over Sylvia’s hips without the need for surgery. This was our family’s personal E=MC squared and led me to the knowledge that I would never understand either physics or teenage girls, a situation still in play today. 

In some European countries the people who are waiting for the local bureaucracies to approve the applications for their families to join them often describe, as the form-filling months pass, the “gradual grinding down of hope”. Dad was here for four years waiting for mum to join him – he had to save up – the loneliness, even in a beautiful country that loved and welcomed him, was tough. 

Woody Allen’s autobiography was entitled “Without Feathers”, a direct response to the poet Emily Dickinson, who famously said, “hope is the thing with feathers”. Hope is the rising dawn, the thing at the end of the rainbow, the driver that keeps us going. 

Interesting how it permeates so much of our language and, consequently, our thoughts. Every day a zillion people fill in a k10 questionnaire from a health professional like me, and one of the 10 questions is “how often do you feel without hope?” Every day, we hear about “hopes” on morning TV for the weather, the stock market, the sports team du jour, and every night they reflect it back to us in their evening edition.

But the coolest thing about hope is that it is our own. When we decide that the Raiders have a chance at the finals this year, it is our decision to think that, and, in turn, creates our own disappointment if we don’t. It is our decision how to interpret success. 

It’s also our decision how we react to those hopes being disappointed – how much will we let these things hurt us? And finally, it’s our collective decisions that determine the narrative of hope – what occurred in society.

I’m pleased to report that Sylvia is in her 50s and requires no complex apparatus to fit into her jeans, although to be fair, I’m not sure what size they are. I do know she’s happy. 

I’m delighted that St George have avoided their first wooden spoon since 1935 by finally coming second last this year – hopes don’t need to be high! 

I’ve read my Viktor Frankl and know that even in the worst, most appalling situations from Nazi camps to situations we all can find ourselves in – it is the hope that can save us and the hope that can devastate us – and it is entirely our choice – it’s our choice what we hope for, and our choice how to think and how to behave when the results come in. 

You know what else we can choose? We can talk to others about their hopes, their dreams, their desires. We can save the people we love millions of kilowatts of sadness by helping them define, refine and fiddle with their hopes, remove the dumb ones, encourage the realistic ones, help them get there, and never step on their dreams. 

And if we can’t help them drag on their jeans, we can laugh ourselves stupid and have fun – I have available the translations of every Abba song upon request!