Elpis

Hope in the Philokalia is not optimistic wishful thinking. It is a settled confidence grounded in experience — the assurance that the path leads somewhere real, based on the tradition's accumulated testimony and, eventually, on your own experience of gradual transformation.

Gregory of Sinai lists hope among the requirements for the practice of stillness, alongside faith, patience, and love. It is not a feeling you generate by trying to feel hopeful. It is what develops in the person who has been at this long enough to see that the practice actually does something — that the mind does become more settled, that the passions do lose their grip, that something is genuinely happening even when it is invisible from the inside.