Hope

Last week, my sister and I saw the new Batman movie. There was a punishment where people were dropped into a deep pit, a literal hell on earth. It was inescapable, but the sky was visible from the depths of the pit. This was to enhance the suffering, one of the characters said, because without hope there could be no true despair.

I wonder about thus. I usually think of hope as a protective factor against despair, giving me a reason to fight on. However, continually hoping and continually being disappointed in those hopes is perhaps a much deeper form of suffering than having no hope at all.

Consider a man who cannot beat his weightbon his legs if he holds onto hope, he will repeatedly stand and fall, accruing bruises and despair as his legs crumble time and time again. The man with no hope will stay down and thus, he only has to fall once. After that, he is safe because there is nowhere left to fall. Resting a cheek against rock bottom can be comforting because it absolves us of the responsibility to keep fighting in the face of the fear of failure. When we stop hoping, we allow ourselves to give up.

While sometimes giving up on the impossible is adaptive, we often mistake for impossible what is merely improbable. Thus subtle distinction lies at the heart of the decision to hope. If we give up on the improbable, we save ourselves the trouble of pain and disappointment and dashed expectations. However, we also rob ourselves of truly living.

Safety is important, but in large doses, it can be stifling, suffocating, smothering. In falling and rising, we gain toughness and strength so that one day we can rise for good. When we stop hoping we are essentially saying that comfort is more important than fulfillment and that we value the avoidance of pain more than the pursuit of life.

I'll close with a favorite quote from Vaclev Havel: "Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same ad joy that things are going well or willingness to invest on enterprises that are obviously headed for success but rather an ability to work for something because it is good."