Everyday Canvas

Hope

Prompt: Hope.
I had hope. It wasn't much hope but it was a little. Then it turned out to have a thousand pieces, Scattering it in all directions. Hope for the best, expect the worst. When is the last time you felt all hope was lost but things got better?


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Somehow, I believe I never lost hope. If I had, I probably wouldn’t be alive. Even in my darkest hours when I was grieving for someone or something, I always saw hope in other things. This may be because, at some point in my life--I don’t know when but possibly when I was very little, I must have been taught or I must have found out on my own to view life in its totality.

This type of looking at life might work because even a tiny bit of hope can go a long way. Since hope has a tint of optimism in it, it influences how we feel in the present while creating a positive outlook for the future. It also has a way of blocking the current situation no matter how bleak it may be.

Hope is not considered, by some psychologists, an emotion, however. These psychologists claim that this is because emotions are reflexive and they cause physical or behavioral changes. Others, on the other hand, believe hope to be an emotional state.

I think of hope as an understanding of life that determines our way of seeing events and situations in life. Hope is eternal, but only in its general form, as there are situations in life we need to let go because we understand no good will come out of them if we insist. Being hopeful in such a situation means carrying a false hope and setting ourselves up to feel ruined at the end when that situation goes down the drain. In such a specific case, giving up hope can be our saving grace.

As for the “hope for the best, expect the worst” saying, I can understand why it is said, but I don’t agree with its wording. Why should we expect the worst in anything? If it means, ‘should things go badly, don’t be too upset,’ it is okay, but still, why would I even start something or go along with something that I am expecting the worst from? Shouldn’t I at least have a limited expectation for it? Anyhow, there is little difference between hope and expectation. In fact, in some languages, they are one and the same. For example, from esperer, it is spero, spēs, speī in Latin, and from esperar, esperanza in Spanish.

In short, as Martin Luther King said, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”