Showered with a renewed sense of hope this evening after reading one of my favorite novels, I feel it pertinent to comment on the phenomenon. To hope is defined as wishing for something with expectation of its fulfillment; it serves a beacon of light for most, and fires passion and motivation in all. To have hope is to understand the possibility of improvement, the refinement of a sullied experience, a reprieve for the unbending will of fate’s catastrophes. I can recognize the feeling in my own being as a splash of positivity and inextricable excitement, when worries get washed away and troubles find no seed for harvest. It may linger on for a few minutes to even days, and daily existence carries on in its usual form but with a distinct beam of innate knowledge that something good is near fruition.
Hope can be as natural to man as any other feeling; it is almost a reflex to expect good fortune and joyous moments amongst everyday sorrows. But I sometimes ask myself: is it possible to ever be without hope, either for immediate fulfillment of joy or long-term expectations of improvement? Could it be possible for one to be so brow-beaten by events and occurrences in a life that it could be fully instilled in their consciousness the certain knowledge that nothing will ever get better?
I would first look to people in the most dire of situations; poverty, hunger, illness, etc. It is easier to acknowledge the state of hopelessness for those who live in unstable situations that harbor danger and disorder on a daily basis. To live in constant tragedy would most definitely produce some sort of expectation of things going always awry. There is no expectation of fulfillment because there is no expectation. There may be slivers of hope, but only in the immediate happinesses of transient things, like good weather, a day of less fighting, a little extra food for a daily meal. However, the overall situation of someone living in such a state could afford little hope in a grand measure: one to ease their life completely and rid the immediate danger of its daily trials. I can speak little more for such situations because I have not lived them, and I would not want to underestimate the power of the world’s goodwill to alleviate the burden of those that battle such life-threatening trials.
I will instead question the existence of hopelessness in those who do not live in precarious environments, but are plagued with failed fulfillment of the emotional kind. Could there exist a numbing of this reflex of optimism, caused by constant despair of mind? When one’s own greatest desire can be fully dampened by life experiences, it is easy to ensnare oneself in a cage with no key. The prospect of possibility may seem a distant glow in a field of constant failure with no means of mowing those barriers that have planted their roots so firmly on one’s own concept of expected fulfillment.
To live such a life would be terrible indeed, and to find no means of alleviating the void of optimism would not extenuate an overbearing hopelessness. I have faith in others as I do in myself that, in our darkest hours, a little pocket of strength outside ideals of hope will be found to rip those weeds of their root and allow us to plow forward.
