The Maintenance of Hope: On Rust, Routine, and the Fine Art of Not Giving Up

Hope, if we’re being honest, isn’t the sleek sports car people believe it to be. It’s not the gleaming red convertible gliding effortlessly down the coastal road of life. No, hope is a rusty old banger with one headlight gone, spurious leaks and a suspicious rattle you can’t quite locate — but you keep it because it’s yours, and because somehow, against the odds, it keeps on going.

Hope, in other words, requires constant maintenance and periodic cajoling.

I used to think of hope as a thing you either had or didn’t have. The kind of inner sunshine that came pre-installed in the naturally optimistic, while the rest of us just stared out from under a leaking umbrella. But the longer I’ve been around, the more I’ve realised that hope isn’t a feeling at all — it’s a kind of upkeep. It’s something you do, not something you wait to feel.

Like checking your oil levels, it’s a small, unglamorous task that keeps everything else from grinding to a complete and sudden halt.

There are days when hope purrs along quite happily — when the weather is fair, the coffee strong, and the world seems vaguely aligned in your favour. You might even forget you’re maintaining anything at all. Then there are the other days: the mornings when your metaphorical battery is as flat as week old roadkill, and you find yourself rummaging through the emotional boot of your life for the jumper cables.

That’s when you need the strangest and often most random things to get going again. A scrap of music that seems to remember you better than you remember yourself. A daft joke shared by a friend. A text from someone who doesn’t need anything from you except your company. These are your cables — the connectors that spark life back into the flat battery of your mind.

And then there’s the news cycle and social media — that great, squeaky conveyor belt that insists on delivering catastrophe in high definition every fifteen minutes.

They are like road salt for the old hatchback of hope: corrosive, ubiquitous, and very good at finding the tiniest chip in the paint and turning it into a problem that feels terminal. Scroll for long enough and you start to believe that the whole engine has seized when really someone down the lane has simply dropped a spanner.

Algorithms amplify outrage because outrage pays the toll, and what we get in return is a steady drip of performative optimism — neatly packaged affirmations that are more about looking resilient than being so. The result is a strange economy where hope is both overexposed and starved: every crisis is spotlighted until our muscle memory for small, private repairs gradually declines.

Treat your notifications like salt: useful in tiny doses, lethal in a blizzard. Turn the radio down. Close the feed. Go outside and do something ridiculous and ordinary — laugh, boil an egg, call someone from your phonebook at random and have a real human to human conversation — and somewhere in that quiet, unpaid maintenance, real hope will find a socket and the engine will cough back to life.

Sometimes, the act of maintaining hope looks and feels vaguely absurd. You might find yourself casually laughing at an old sitcom in the middle of an existential crisis or whistling while your world slowly falls apart. That’s not denial — that’s mechanics. You’re keeping your machine running. You’re refusing to let despair take the wheel.

Hope, at its heart, is a form of stubbornness dressed as optimism. It’s saying, I’ll try again tomorrow, even when today has been an unmitigated disaster. It’s picking the elements from your tool box — a song, a friend, a walk, a cup of coffee — and tinkering with your mood until the engine coughs back to life.

And sometimes, maintenance isn’t about fixing anything. It’s about acknowledging that, for now, the car’s in the garage. That you can’t drive it today, but you’ll come back tomorrow with fresh hands and better light.

I’ve met people who run entirely on borrowed hope — the kind they get from others. You see it in the way they light up when someone believes in them. That’s fine too. Hope is communal property, really. We lend it out and borrow it back, like sugar or jumper leads. The trick is to keep it circulating. The moment it’s hoarded, it rusts.

There’s a phrase I once heard — “Hope is not a strategy.” I think that’s wrong. It might not be a plan, but it’s the only strategy that keeps you moving when the map’s been lost to the wind.

If despair is entropy — the slow unravelling of purpose — then hope is maintenance. It’s WD-40 for the soul. It’s knowing that the squeak won’t fix itself, but also that the squeak isn’t fatal.

And maybe that’s the quiet miracle of it all: that the human heart, despite everything, keeps trying to turn over again each morning. Some days it starts with a roar, other days it sputters and stalls — but either way, it still tries.

So yes — hope needs servicing. It demands attention. It breaks down, sometimes spectacularly, on the side of life’s motorway. But if you treat it with patience, feed it laughter, and occasionally give it a jump-start of music or kindness, it’ll take you further than you’d ever expect.

Even if the engine light never quite goes out.