On Hope

Knowing only enough of what tomorrow may herald to be worried about its coming can lead a man to forget his hopes for today and, at the worst, many tomorrows to come. Hope is among the strangest of human tendencies I've discovered. It can blind us to reality in some instances. More often, I think, hope serves as the only thing to get us through adversity in one piece.

We harbor hope for things concrete and things abstract. One day we might hope to see a loved one overcome addiction, the next to see the global economy recover. Our hopes are many and varied, and the priorities we assign to them are sometimes thoroughly irrational. We rely on hope far more often than perhaps we should. We might call it faith or luck or dreaming, but we know it always for what it represents -- something we desire to be or to become true that is not.

Hope can be a dangerous thing. If we allow ourselves to be caught up in what we wish for, we risk forgetting to enjoy and be grateful for what we already have, even to driving that potential for happiness out of our lives because we've convinced ourselves that we need more. Perhaps it is a thing of our culture to always want more, to never be satisfied with what we deem to be "less," and it is unfortunate. I'll borrow a quote from the movie Bruce Almighty that stuck with me: "But since when does anyone have a clue about what they want?" I certainly don't, when it comes down to it.

In the opposite vein, hope can be the key to our survival. When times are truly bleak, when the world seems set against us in all things, we might have only the hope for it to improve left to us. Perhaps this stems from our earliest memories of childhood. When we scraped a knee or banged an elbow, we hoped only for Mom to be around the corner, waiting to kiss that pain away. Here's the strangest part, the thing that I think makes hope one of the most vital aspects of human existence -- it worked. When our mother or father did kiss us to ease our sorrow, it went, or at least seemed to. In truth, we may only have convinced ourselves that the pain was lesser -- we hoped it would ease, and so it did. What does this tell us about the nature of hope?

The perspective I've taken is that hope can be many things, but at its very best, it is the driving force for change. If we hope strongly and righteously enough, we can find within ourselves the motivation to make the hope a reality, to forge that new truth. Hope is, in these times, a source of the purest energy known to man -- willpower.

I read an article a few days ago entitled "The Opacity of Hope," and it was the title itself that got me thinking, the idea of assigning a quality of visibility to hope. The notion of hope being generally opaque -- that is, something we cannot see through -- is rather pessimistic and, frankly, dangerous. This would be the kind of "blind hope" that prevents us from comprehending or appreciating the reality around us.

What, then, about "transparent" hope, or that which we can see through? If we can see through our hope, we are able to perceive every detail of it, and it loses its value -- the chance to motivate and guide us towards a goal. If we can see everything about it, we can see also that our hope is a falsity -- something that we wish to be true but is not. This defeats the purpose of hoping to begin with.

A middle ground, then, would be translucent hope. We must be able to see and understand what it is that our hope represents, but not so much detail as to recognize it as false -- something that does not and therefore cannot exist (a falsity in itself). We must allow enough of the light of hope to shine through, basking us in the glow of a promise and at the same time lighting the path we must walk. Yes, translucent hope is the kind I would call good and worthy.

The problem is that not all hope is or can be made translucent. I most certainly do and will harbor hopes of each variety. I think, then, that I will seek out those translucent hopes and then pursue them. At the same, I will struggle to recognize opacity or transparency when I see it and not waste more of my time or energy on it.

I will try as hard as I can to appreciate what I have already. When I find that I hope for something that truly is worthy of pursuit, I will travel the path that the gentle glow of translucence illuminates for me, and I will do so without guilt or remorse or worry, because I will know it to be good.

Here's to translucent hope for us all.

Sláinte

Originally published at The Aspiring Professional