I was walking home with a sandwich in hand when I suddenly started contemplating how people tweet. Since I started using twitter, it has always been a restricted blog. It was a way to cram as much information as possible into a 140 character dose, like a blog reduction. I am not alone in this venture. I have seen stories, recipes, and general life updates. These types of posts are the "microblogs." These are great for the lazy blog readers. In three minutes, I can catch up on everything that happened in the past week.
What I realized today is that Twitter is an excellent opportunity to practice simplicity. The 140 character limit isn't a restriction within which I need to force the account of my day. Instead, it is a challenge to write whatever I want to say in the simplest form. My new goal is to practice simplicity when I tweet. . . at least some of the time.

As you know, I dearly love This American Life. I love it so much that I keep episodes and listen to them over and over again. So much that I enrolled in a minicourse on the Audio Essay. Well, I'm listening to episode #178: Superpowers, and this particular quote struck me:

"Typically, this is how it goes. People who turn invisible sneak into the movies or onto airplanes, people who fly stop taking the bus. Here is one thing pretty much no one ever says, 'I would use my power to fight crime.' No one seems to care about crime..."
"...Going-to-Paris man is not a superhero, and I have to say this drove me crazy a little bit, we are, after all, talking about super powers. Why not take down organized crime, bring hope to the hopeless, swear vengeance on the underworld, if only a little bit?"

Do we really need superpowers to inspire hope? I think not. Hope is a funny thing. Now I'm no philosopher, linguist, or sociologist; but I think hope is simply our belief that something will be the way we want it to be. Kind of like wishing, but hope has a little more wiggle room. When you wish for something, you are usually pretty specific, "I wish I had a bit more money," or "I wish things didn't turn out like this," or even, "Do you think we will make it to the top? ...I wish."

Hope, in a way, prepares you for disappointment, but gives you that little bit of light inside. "Oh, I hope so!" has a much lighter feeling than "I wish." People inspire hope, desire generates wishes. Hope gives you the strength to continue, wishing makes you realize where you are. "You cannot live on hope alone, but, without it, life is not worth living."



Go give some hope out today.