Hope

Hope is a strange thing.

It is such that even if something has a 90% of not happening, you cling on to that 10% that it will…. And you cling to it as if it were a 50%. Because hope means that you ignore statistics and probabilities and likelihoods and what other people tell you will happen and instead, you believe in your mind that the outcome of something can only be a yes or a no… and that means 50-50 no matter what other people say. It’s the irrationality of hope.

But hope isn’t this deep, solid, sturdy anchor that you lean on when all seems to be crumbling down. It doesn’t give you some great sense of security and protection. It doesn’t give the answers to your question. It doesn’t even give you the solutions to your problems. Instead, it’s just this tiny voice inside your head tell you “Give it one more try…. It will work out….. somehow…..” And more often than not, that tiny voice gets drowned out by worries, fears, insecurities and doubt and we end up despairing instead of hoping. It’s the fragility of hope

Yet for all its fragility, hope is a lot like one of those stubborn coffee stains on your favourite white shirt. It just refuses to go away. One of the more famous quotes about hope says that “When things are bad, we take comfort in the thought that they could always be worse. And when they do get worse, we find hope in the thought that now that things are so bad, they can only start to get better.” Such is its nature. Our hearts cling on so fiercely to hope as if life depended on it. It’s the indestructibility of hope.

Hope is the difference between a person hanging on and giving up. In war times, generals knew that the surest way to defeat your enemy was not to kill them, but demoralize them… take away their hope. A person who has nothing to hope for, has nothing to live for. And a person who has nothing to live for, has nothing to fight for. Whereas a person who has hope finds himself stronger and braver than he ever thought possible. He dares to live and dares to fight even when the odds are 9 to 1 against him because he has hope, and again, that means the odds are at least 50-50.. If our hearts were an ocean, a single drop of hope would be enough to change its colour. Hope changes everything. For as crazy, irrational and fragile as it is, its undying nature and phoenix like ability to rise over and over again from the ashes ensures that even when things are at its hardest, we continue on in hope.   And therein lays the power of hope.

There is a supposedly French quote that says that “Hope is the dream of a soul awake”

So if you find yourself in a hard place in life my friend... never stop hoping, or dreaming for the matter.