“Remember, hope is a good thing. Maybe even the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.” - Stephen King
Hope, I think, is a fascinating construct of the human mind. It allows us to create possibilities for the future that may well only exist in our minds but at the same time makes us work towards or make us believe in an idea that we think is achievable. It is akin to cheer for ourselves while simultaneously being in the arena and in the stands. Hope makes us powerful as it colors our perspective with an optimism that sometimes can be construed to be irrational. A terminally ill patient and their family, often hope against all odds, determined to not be governed by statistics and history. They believe that they could be the outliers, even though the probability seems bleak. But it is important to underscore that statistics do not apply to individuals. Various survivors of accidents, diseases and natural disasters never had the odds going for them, but the hope to make it through does shine a dim light at the end of what would seem a very long tunnel and it would seem worthwhile to hang on to it.
I obviously don’t mean to fall prey to survivorship bias and ignore the number of the people that didn't make it, or the outcomes that were less than favorable. My point is just that while we can recognize the facts and difficult chances, we should also be hopeful, because sometimes, things do turn out as we hope. Hopeful optimism would be a great succinct way to describe what I am saying.
But hope is fickle too, as it can bring us not only joy but also despair and oftentimes not in equal measure. I am a firm believer in the innate optimism that I think lies in every person, and that makes us hope in the bleakest of circumstances. Sometimes, we need someone else to show us that ray of light that we may be blind to, because hope is not a bright flash that can be seen from everywhere, but a dim, flickering light fighting steadily and courageously the portent of darkness. As Martin Luther King Jr. said this beautifully “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” This captures in its entirety of what hope means to me. The outcomes of hope may or may not be as we imagined them to be, but once the future materializes, we can only get disappointed in a finite way because there are no two ways to the reality. However there is an infinite amount of hope that exists, because hope by definition makes us live in the future.
There is a difference between expectations and hope, I feel. Expectation is a measure of certainty. It captures what we think is going to be, given the circumstances. It resides in the rational corner of the mind, and recalibrates based on new information. Hope lives at the horizon of rationality. Hope is a measure of possibility, and we are limited by our imagination. Great things have come out of being hopeful, and though it might be a small percentage given the large denominator, but life changing discoveries, inventions and improbable chance events have happened in a circumstance where none of that was possible, and hope allows us to live in that possibility.
I used to think that despair is the opposite of hope. But I find that to be not entirely true. Despair, like joy, is a consequence of hope. We feel incredible joy when something hopeful turns out and disappointment and despair when it does not. Joy and despair are outcomes, like two sides of the coin of hope (without equal probability, of course). The opposite of hope is indifference and resignation. To not care about the endless possibilities that lie and to forego chances to become better is to be without hope. To give up and resign to how things are without trying to change things is to not be hopeful. To think there is nothing you can do, is to give up hope. I do know that it is hard to stay optimistic in the face of difficult times, but I do believe it is what we should do. It is what we must do, more than ever.
“I dwell in possibility” - Emily Dickinson
