Hope

I have always been aware of the different personalities that we all posses. I also understand that each and every single one of us has distinct values instilled within, against which we weigh and process the abstract ideas and concepts. Hence I know that every individual would define hope in a different, intimate and very personal way. And that fascinates me. Pondering on the topic, I found myself dwelling upon two quotes on hope, each conveying a drastically different message from the other, and each being not at all far from the truth. “Hope is a dream of a soul awake” - says an old French proverb; “Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man” – states Friedrich Nietzsche. I found myself wondering, what is it that made them think so differently? What indeed was that only ingredient left in Pandora’s box?

Personally, hope for me represents the anxiety of wishing upon a star, fully in expectation, despite knowing that the chances for the wish coming true are extremely slight. After all, slight does not imply impossible per se. Hope is the invisible energy that rules our world, a force that alerts us, stirs our thoughts, makes us rather strive for improvement and achievement, aim at success and happiness when we could just remain satisfied with the current situation. It is the spiritus movens of every human being: once you choose to hope, anything is possible!

Moreover, it is an unwritten rule that people who do hope for something and wish for it hard enough, have their wish miraculously accomplished. A person without hope would lose the human part of his being and would thus merge with an endless dullness and gray dismal. It would mean that this person does not yearn to anything, no matter what! A person like that, in my opinion, is much like a dog: having only black and white vision, never experiencing all the colors and the various tones and shadows that they form.

However, hope can be shattered and burst as a fragile bubble into a million pieces. Hope may fall on earth in the form of meteor shower: glimmering and shiny from far away but disastrous if too close. Many times false hope has proven only to be mendacious to the one that hopes, tormenting the people and even maybe preventing them from seeing the real situation and facing the truth.

This is why I believe hope represents much more than the mere dictionary interpretation of “a feeling that what is wanted is likely to happen”. It is a universal, supersonic force that drives our world and us, its inhabitants, towards the never-achievable perfection.