10 Short Stories About Hope When Life Feels Hard

A farmer's donkey fell into an old well. The animal cried for hours. The farmer thought about it. The donkey was old. The well was deep. He decided to fill the well in and bury the donkey.

He started shoveling dirt into the well. The donkey howled. Then it went quiet.

The farmer looked down. The donkey was doing something he didn't expect. Every time a shovel of dirt hit its back, the donkey shook it off and stepped up on it. Shake it off, step up. Shake it off, step up.

By the end of the day, the donkey walked out of the well.

Arthur Boorman came home from the Gulf War with two bad knees and a broken back. The doctors told him he would never walk on his own again. Not without crutches. Not without a brace. Not ever.

Fifteen years went by. He got heavier. He got more tired. He almost gave up. Then he found a yoga video. He started doing it sitting down. Then standing with help. Then standing alone.

It took six months before he could walk across the room. It took a year before he could jog. The doctors had said never. They were wrong.

He posted a video of himself running. Millions of people watched it. Some of them stood up out of their own wheelchairs.

A boy built a sandcastle. He worked on it all afternoon. He built walls. He built towers. He used a paper cup to make patterns in the sand.

A big wave came in. His sandcastle was gone. Just like that. Flat sand.

His older sister thought he was going to cry. She got ready to comfort him. He didn't cry. He picked up his bucket. He started digging again.

"I'm building it higher this time," he said. "The wave taught me where the weak spot was."

A young woman came to her mother in tears. "I can't do it anymore," she said. "As soon as I solve one problem, three more show up."

Her mother brought her into the kitchen. She put three pots of water on the stove. In the first she dropped a carrot. In the second she dropped an egg. In the third she dropped some coffee beans.

Twenty minutes later, she pulled them out. The carrot was soft and limp. The egg was hard inside its shell. The coffee bean had changed the water into something rich and dark and warm.

"You will face boiling water in this life," her mother said. "The question is what you become in it. Do you go soft? Do you get hard? Or do you change what is around you?"

Nathan was 25 years old. He had a wife. He had two small kids. He went skiing one weekend. He fell. He shattered his neck.

The doctors told him he was paralyzed. He would not walk again. He went into rehab the next week. He didn't argue with the doctors. He just made a promise to himself in private.

He worked harder than anyone in the rehab unit. He fell out of his wheelchair more times than he could count. Then one day he could move a toe. Then a foot. Then a leg.

Three years later, he walked his daughter down the aisle at her wedding rehearsal. He cried the whole way. So did everyone else.

Two frogs fell into a bucket of cream. The sides were too steep to climb. The cream was too thick to swim in.

One frog said, "This is hopeless." He stopped kicking. He sank.

The other frog kept kicking. He didn't see a way out. He just kicked because he didn't know what else to do.

Hours went by. He kept kicking. The cream slowly turned into butter under his feet. He pushed off the butter and jumped out of the bucket.

A man planned to take his own life. He sat at his kitchen table. He wrote a goodbye letter. Then he heard a knock at the door.

It was his neighbor. She had baked too much banana bread and brought him half. "I didn't want it to go to waste," she said. She had no idea what was happening on the other side of the door.

He stood there with the warm loaf in his hands. He said, "Could you come in for a minute?" She did. She stayed for two hours.

He never sent the letter. He kept it in a drawer. Years later he told his neighbor what she had done. She cried. She said she had been lonely too. She said she only baked the bread because she needed an excuse to talk to someone.

An old man planted a tree in his backyard. His grandson watched him. "Grandpa, you're 90," the boy said. "You won't ever sit in its shade."

The old man kept patting the dirt down. "That's right," he said. "But someone will. Someone who isn't even born yet will sit under this tree."

The boy thought about that for a long time. He thought about it for the rest of his life.

Sixty years later, the boy was an old man himself. He sat under that tree with his own grandson. He told him the story. Then he handed him a small shovel and a young sapling.

A pencil and an eraser sat on a teacher's desk. The pencil felt bad. "Every mistake I make, you make smaller," said the pencil. "You get worn down because of me."

The eraser smiled. "That's true. But that's why I exist. I was made for your mistakes."

The pencil thought about that. "But you'll be gone someday. You'll erase yourself away."

The eraser nodded. "Yes. And then you'll be a better writer. That's a fair trade."

Sometimes the people who love us are the eraser. They get smaller fixing what we get wrong. They never tell us. They just keep doing it.

She applied for 117 jobs over the course of nine months. She got 109 rejections. Three ghostings. Four interviews that went nowhere. She lived on instant noodles. She slept on her sister's couch.

On try 117, she got the call. It was a small company. The pay wasn't great. But it was a job. She took it.

Five years later she runs that company's whole department. She makes more than the people who rejected her at the other 116 places.

She kept the rejection emails. She has them in a folder. She reads them sometimes. Not to be bitter. To remember that no doesn't mean never. It usually just means not yet.