Merry MacLellan
Editor
There’s something about making it to the middle of the semester, stuck with endless busy work and the looming fear of finals sinking in that can make it difficult to push through the days. It so often seems like wherever you look, something bad is happening. On the news and in our lives, something goes wrong and it’ so easy to become filled with gloom and dread.
This year’s speaker at the Welty Gala, Elizabeth Smart, has a lot of reasons to know about despair. She is famously known across the country for being the girl who was kidnapped and spent nine months with her captors before finally escaping and returning home. However, the moment I met her before the gala and the moment she started to speak, it was hard to even believe that.
She greeted everyone with a smile, told her own life story with humor and never flinched away from talking about the hardships she went through. Instead, Smart took the deliberate time to tell us how she braved the hardships with one main piece of advice for anyone listening to know: find or make your own hope and happiness.
“There is nothing more important than having hope in difficult circumstances,” she said.
From anyone else, it would be easy enough to dismiss that message. It’s constantly being sold on motivational mugs and signs, it’s on the internet and coming from miscellaneous motivational speakers. Hearing that from her was different. Enough so that I perked up in my seat and not just because I needed something to write about for this column (I had something else entirely planned out).
“Always keep reaching for hope and happiness,” Smart said.
Because without hope, what do we have? For Smart, hope kept her alive during the worst moments of her life. It’s what makes us put one foot in front of the other and keep going even on our hardest days.
These past few days I have been so busy, it would be so easy for me to do it all out of obligation, without any care or heart. Instead, I’ve been guided by a small voice that has enticed me with the great possibilities that might occur.
Hope has led me to interview the most incredible people and attend the most interesting events with the possibility that it will change my life (it has). Hope is what motivates me to take the time piecing together this edition of the Spectator, because I hope that these stories might change someone’s life. At the very least, I hope that it’s an interesting read.
“It’s easy to get caught up on these things,” Smart said. “But never surrender, never give up hope.”