(UNDATED) Our daughter Molly is our horse girl; she’s been riding since she was 8 year old. Yesterday (she’s now 17) she came home quite discouraged from riding Cutter. He’s not making progress and she’s getting frustrated. For the first time in her life, she talked about giving up on riding.

The timing could not have been worse — she just spent the entire weekend at an exhilarating riding event and then stopped at the “Bony Pony” to buy new accessories for Cutter and new riding outfits for herself.

I am no stranger to discouragement myself. I am on a deadline for my next book and spent yesterday trying to wrestle a chapter into submission. There is a universal phenomenon among writers to sit in front of a blank page and suddenly every possible minor diversion becomes a pressing priority. There are paperclips to be rearranged, a birdfeeder to be refilled, a book to be read, another cup of coffee that will surely help, a phone call to an acquaintance you’ve not talked to in years.

I was strangely comforted to read of Thomas Merton’s writer’s block in one of his diaries: “I sit at the typewriter with my fingers all wound up in a cat’s cradle of strings, overwhelmed with the sense of my own stupidity, and surrounded by not one but a multitude of literary dilemmas … I tell myself, `I am no writer, I am finished.”‘

Our nation, too, is discouraged, and I can see it in the microcosm of my own little world here in the San Juan Islands. People who have never missed a day of work in their lives are jobless. Homes are in foreclosure. Magazine articles urge Americans to stop saving and start spending; I only know people who are cutting back spending so they can survive.

Our president campaigned on the promise of audacious hope. Now his neatly laid plans are gathering dust in the back of a file drawer because the economic disaster has pushed itself to the top of the heap.

Charles Dickens said of his best-of-times/worst-of-times era in his “Tale of Two Cities”: “It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair … “

Sound familiar?

Molly and her horse, I and my writing, Obama and the nation’s economic crisis, all share in common a discouragement originating in problems of our own making. At some deep level, we created the mess. And we are the ones who need to get ourselves out of it.

In 1990, a few months after Czechoslovakia freed itself from Communist rule, Vaclav Havel — playwright, dissident, prisoner and then president of the Czech Republic — declared the failure of centralized government and shared the lessons he had learned in a speech to the U.S. Congress.

“The salvation of the human world lies nowhere else but in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in personal responsibility,” he said. “Without a global revaluation in this sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better … and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed — whether it be ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization — will be unavoidable.”

Forgive me if this sounds overly simple. Molly must get back on her horse. I must write my book. President Obama must remember that the audacious hope he campaigned about resides in individual human hearts, not in impersonal bureaucracies — governmental, corporate or otherwise.

The “power to the people” cry of the 1960s was a half-truth. Power to the people is only a solution when the empowered people are men and women of good will and generous hearts, who bear a sense of personal responsibility, a willingness to sacrifice and to deny personal gratification for the common good.

(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)