Sign post of hope

What you are about to read is dedicated to that select group (you know who you are) who have been to me the living embodiment of what I want to speak about.

When Dante was picturing the gate of Hell in his Divine Comedy there was no phrase that could sum up such a place of abandonment more than the sign he pinned above the entrance:

‘abandon hope all ye who enter here.’

For the great poet, to find yourself there was the epitome of all hopelessness.

Just over a year ago I began a slow glide towards depression which soon gathered momentum like a fully laden dumper truck going down Everest. At one point I remember having a dream that summed up where it then went.

Imagine driving your kids to the beach on a beautiful sunny day, the car is full of joy and music; the windows are down and the coastline approaches. I am doing seventy because the road allows for that, without any warning whatsoever there is suddenly no road under the car and we are sailing through the air several hundred feet up. The road had led directly over a cliff and there is only a steady plummeting towards imminent death.

I can still feel that sickening wrench as I looked at my kids and told them that I loved them and was sorry.

It was just a dream, but in reality that’s what happened to everything I had as a foundation in my life. Physically nothing had actually changed, but mentally everything did.

I could chronicle the intervening months in great detail,  but what I want to consider is what I have come to call, sign posts of hope.

These are people, events, moments that indicated that life was not over for me. I was extremely privileged to have people who could ‘hope’ for me when I couldn’t hope for myself.

As a Christian my ultimate hope rests in the Almighty God and His love for me, depression robbed me of the knowledge of even that hope; mentally it was impossible to process that love or any love, but I had people close to me who never ever stopped speaking it and showing that love unconditionally.

I described it to my friend like being under a black cloud looking out to people living in the sunshine, I knew that life was going on all around and people were living normal lives out there, but I was suspended in here like some kidnap victim in a basement hanging from the ceiling.

I want to encourage you if you are in the midst of it all to grab even the tiniest thought that the sunshine is still there,  and that you too will one day be back in it. I don’t know if I would have listened to me saying that last year but I must at least try. Anything,  however small, grab it, store it look at it, try to believe that any seed however small (if planted) can grow.

If you know someone who is there, keep putting up sign posts for them to see; my wife wrote regularly on to our chalkboard messages of hope. She never nagged or got angry, she just kept posting them within eyesight.

I believe that one of the main reasons for my recovery were these sign posts directing me away from myself to something better.

I have made some permanent sign posts in my life now (just in case) and I try to remind myself regularly of those few dear souls who were, themselves, loving signposts of hope, directing me away from myself to something better.