A couple of weeks ago, I read Frank Deford’s “An American Summer” which tells the story of Christy, a fourteen-year-old boy who moves to Baltimore the summer of 1954. Almost immediately he meets Cathryn, a twenty-three-year-old who contracted polio six years ago and now lives in an iron lung. It is an unlikely connection that leads to an extraordinary relationship.

At one point, Cathryn is trying to convince Christy to do something he doesn’t believe is possible. She asks, “Can you believe maybe?” The distinction she makes between what we believe and what we believe maybe is effort. If I believe maybe there’s a God, then I still have a question to answer and thus work to do. Believing there is a God pretty much settles the matter.

I have been struggling with the concept of hope for quite some time. It first became an issue when I realized hoping I’d get healthy was causing me to live for tomorrow and not enjoy today. Then hope got all tangled up with the lack of dating in my life. People kept telling me that if I didn’t have hope that I’d meet someone, then I never would. I argued hoping for something that was statistically unlikely was the road to insanity. After that, my life began to completely come apart at the seams and I was devoid of hope that it would get better.

Our hearts are designated the home of our emotions. Over the past four years, I’ve learned much about following mine and so far it hasn’t caused me to do something I regret. In fact, my regrets tend to stem from the times when I don’t or where circumstances won’t allow me to listen to what it says.

My heart was devoid of hope. It contained wishes, dreams and desires without expectation to tether them to reality. I think hearts learn, shaped by the negative and positive re-enforcement of life experience. My heart was taught not to hope because nothing good ever came from it and many let downs happened. What has hope done for me lately? Caused oceans of tears.

So, I’m done with the idea of hope for now. We’re on a relationship break.

in its place, I’m entertaining the idea of believing maybe. It seems far more suited to me for it allows acknowledgment of things that feel unlikely while not summarily dismissing the possibility entirely. It allows for effort, but it doesn’t have the black hole effect of trying and trying and trying and then watching all your trying vanish into some unreachable place with nothing to show for it. Instead, the trying is tempered by knowing it might be for naught or it might work.

When I think, “I believe maybe this mess my life has become can be fixed,” I do not hear from my heart, “Bullshit.” I hear an echoing “Maybe?”