Hope?

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Why do we hope? Do we hope so we think positively about something thats never going to happen? The truth is too painful to realize or confront so do we mask it with the hope of something better? Is hope simply an illusion we use to bottle up the truth? If it is, is hope really a 'healthy' thing if its delusional?

Why place hope when you know, deep down, that it will not turn out that way?

Work without hope (Coleridge)

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair--
The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing--
And winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring !
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where Amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye Amaranths ! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not ! Glide, rich streams, away !
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll :
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul ?
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

To me it makes no sense not to hope, because we don't know what will happen in the future; there are very few things that I know with certainty won't happen. That's not to say that there aren't situations in which people hope for things they know have an extremely low probability of happening-I have been in that situation before-but it can help people through until they are strong enough to come to that realization. And from a practical point of view, hopelessness usually leads only to depression (and is in fact one of its symptoms) and saps a person of motivation. And if you are speaking of hope in a religious sense, I must start by saying that I have absolutely no reason to believe that the things we hope for are not true and will not happen, and, as one of the characters in C.S Lewis's The Silver Chair says (and I am paraphrasing here) that even if he'd only imagined Narnia and the Sun, he would rather spend his life searching for a dream that never existed than live in a dreary one that could be proven to be real.

Hope is the only reason that keeps anyone alive. If you have no goals, no dreams, nothing to work for, then there really would be no point to make it to tomorrow. So we have to have hope, even if we create it out of an illusion. But hope, true hope is elusive, holding onto true hope is hard work because hope is so slippery. Don't hold on hard enough, it falls out of your hand and you've got nothing but despair. Hold on too tightly and you squeeze it until it turns into a fantasy, which can be just as bad as despair.

You've gotta hold onto it just right, but that takes an enormous amount of effort because its so much easier to let go or hold on tightly, then exert the concentration needed to hold onto it just right. Hope doesn't comfort us like a fantasy, because true hope leaves room for failure. Neither is it easy to hold onto it like despair, because in despair, we have already been let down. Hope realizes the possibility of being let down. The man with dreams will always suffer more than the man with no dreams.

Hope is the fine line between fantasy and despair...

Thanks.. Thats clear and very true

I could say that we just do. And that's that.

But that wouldn't be doing justice to it.


While there is something to be said for hoping because maybe, just maybe things will turn out okay even though it looked like everything is doomed, there is also something to be said for holding out hope even when it really is impossible.

To fight for the right reasons, and still fail. To me that it may even be more noble than to fight against the odds and win. It's easy to talk about values when you come out ahead, but when you're beaten is another story entirely (we'll assume that someone else does the talking, or it's the kind of beaten that you can longer fight, but still talk which is a questionable scenerio)

There is value in the struggle alone. We can learn, and grow from it. To hope is to allow one to continue fighting (and growing) even when what seems like the best course of action is to give up.


But I think that it may be possible to fight when you feel you can't win, even if you don't hold hope. But, this is somewhat questionable. People with strong wills can do some very counter intuitive things.

I think I kind of generalized by thought into one area. I didnt even think of 'hope' in times of desperation, more out of a 'lottery, let me win' type scenario. I totally discounted things like 'defending oneself against the odds.' < -- yikes, and thats a big one with me, too