How do I continue to hope?

I’m no expert in hope. In fact, I feel as lost as the next. So when it appeared repeatedly in the list of topics you wanted me to speak to you about, I was surprised. Apart from daily pleasantries, “hope” hadn’t been a part of my vocabulary for years, and I found myself wondering: why hope? What have you been hoping for? 

These questions galloped through my mind in the wee hours, and after some thought, I remembered a time when I had lost all hope in the beauty of tomorrow. So I wrote this first letter to you, who have lost hope in life itself.

In the past, I believed “hope” to be a word without much substance, no more than a watered down plan. It seemed inactive, requiring me to be passive, to wait for desires to be bestowed on me. I’ve witnessed hopes fracture with every disappointment, every heartbreak, and crumble with every dashed dream. And this is exactly what I didn’t care for. I simply couldn’t have my happiness depend on something so fragile.

So instead of hoping, I relied on doing. I did what I could to create the things I desired to see. I chose destinations and moved forward when I could. When the path veered unexpectedly, I did my best to surrender to the change. And if a path ended, I knew new paths would faithfully appear, because they always had. 

One day, however, all my paths seemed to come to a dead end. Until that point, I had been going hard, traveling, taking in the world, running at an endless pace, living a life full of good tomorrows, and the moment I stopped at the end of that path, stillness washed over me. I have yet to fully understand why, but I can see now that I was falling into another depression, this time so slowly that I barely noticed I was underwater and that I had stopped breathing in life. Unexpectedly, my mind felt like it was filled with deep ocean, my thoughts were muffled and my precious ability to create, and to choose, seemed chopped into confusing fragments. 

I was paralyzed by exhaustion, only seeing beauty and not able to engage with it. So I hung onto beauty as a lifeline to the living. I refused to accept this place, so I willed myself to search for a way out of that forest, to “do” myself forward. But by now daylight had gone and not only was it too dark to see a path out, but it was too dark to see beauty too. 

After some time, I understood that perhaps I was simply living through a winter season in life. (Winters are a necessary cycle and happen at one time or another I believe.) So I waited and waited. It was dark but I knew spring would surely come. 

I waited more. It went darker and colder but I knew tomorrow would come, and with it, the beauty that meant so much to me… wouldn’t it? I mean, hadn’t it always before? 

I waited longer and longer until there were no sounds, no signs of life left around me. In this solitary haze, my mind began to play tricks. I began to wonder if I had made it all up, if spring was a lie I had told myself about before, that perhaps things were never meant to bloom again at all. That darkness went on for longer than long. And when the darkness finally seeped into me, I finally lost hope.

At that moment, I imagined life without hope and it seemed so unbearably meaningless.  Then I remembered all the times I’ve lifted my face to the summer sun, feeling its warmth as I closed my eyes, and what it would be like to believe there was a purpose to it all, regardless of the outcome. 

I had a simple choice. Am I the kind of person that believes the sun will rise again, or not? Will I choose to hope or not? And if I did, then I must choose to hope even when all is bleak, no…only when all is bleak, since believing that summer exists when the sun is shining is of little use.

I say all this not to convince you to hope. Choosing between one or the other may not make a difference to anyone else but you, it is your choice to make. I tell you this story just to say that you are not alone and that I understand what hopelessness feels like.

I chose hope, to believe that summer would come again, not because there was proof it would. And it was certainly not a flimsy desire without conviction. I chose to hope because after every disappointment, every heartbreak, every dashed dream, there was only hope that remained, or nothing at all. 

Though my garden doesn’t seem to have bloomed quite yet, I sense that dawn is beginning to crack. And, in writing this, I wonder if this was all a sort of blossoming in and of itself.