On hope, optimism, and outcome

"Hope," said Vaclav Havel, "is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

This is not what I set out to paint. It's something I created on the way to something else, and I liked it so much I set it aside and re-embarked on another canvas.  Which seems to me a curious twist on the Havel quote.

When we set goals and intentions for ourselves, it's easy to assume that the outcomes we have chosen are the correct outcomes, and that anything less is failure.  Perhaps the essence of faith is trusting that even when the outcome is not what we'd anticipated, there is still value in the process; in the time we've spent and the lessons learned along the way -- and that sometimes the end result, though not what we predicted or expected, might be better than anything we alone could have asked or imagined...