Good Morning Everybody!! It’s Friday. Even if it was a short week for you, Sisyphus’ boulder is still sitting high atop the hill. Now is the time to relax and recoup now that the holidays are over.

Today, for our main course, we’re coming back to our familiar favorite, St. Augustine, to show us how transformation and “becoming” manifests through hope. To burn that off, we’ll analyze our own view of hope. Wrapping up with our Book Nook, we’ll open up Book XIII of Augustine’s Confessions.

It’s Friday, let’s dive in. Thought Breakfast is served!

In this New Year week, we’ve framed becoming as attention, habit, surrender, and suffering. To close it out, we look to the forward-facing dimension of becoming.

Augustine asserts that we are always becoming what we love. What we hope for, then, reveals what we’re moving toward. Hope isn’t optimism or prediction; it’s the engine that propels the soul forward in time.

Augustine says “My love is my weight.” He deeply believed that the object of our love becomes the center of our identity. Reading through Confessions, you notice how he identifies with the things he loves. Further, you can see how his identity shifts, changes, and balances throughout his life. At the start, he identifies with his vicious lust and his feeling of being lost. Toward the end, his entire identity is enwrapped in his faith and love for God. So, when it comes to hope, Augustine would assert we don’t simply have hopes; we are shaped by what we hope in.

Since hope is a desire that stretches toward the future, we can call hope an orientation of the will. The future self, according to Augustine, only reaches toward whatever love calls it toward. Hope, then, is not about outcomes. It’s about direction.

Aristotle told us that habits shape our identity. William James told us attention guides our “becoming.” Viktor Frankl told us that suffering refines our orientation. Kierkegaard showed us how surrendering our control lights the path to becoming. Augustine ties all of this together by showing us the future we’re hoping toward is actively shaping the self we practice now.

Hoping to one day become wise cultivates patience and curiosity in the now. Hoping to become faithful cultivates trust and perseverance. Hoping to become loving cultivates kindness and generosity. Hope forms our endurance, our consistency, and our steadiness in our personal growth.

Answer the following questions with one sentence:

This exercise synthesizes everything we’ve gone over this week, so that we may head into this New Year with a firmly grounded understanding of transformation.

Maybe also ask yourself: If love is my weight, where is it carrying me?

“My love is my weight; wherever I am carried, it is my love that carries me. By your gift we are set aflame and are carried upward, and our heart grows restless until it rests in you.”
- St. Augustine, Confessions XIII.9

This short passage shows perfectly how love determines direction. Augustine demonstrates (using his own life story) how hope is the forward motion of the soul, and not plain desire. Personal growth, then, is the soul’s movement (step by step) toward the true good.

Munch on that for today. As we start 2026, let’s do so with the knowledge that love propels us, hope sustains us, and whatever we become this year shows what our soul has learned to follow, and what it loves. Have a fantastic weekend and come back on Monday for another steaming hot plate of Thought Breakfast!

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Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast