What is hope? Hope is an ideal. An ideal that involves some conception of a type of safety…whether it be in a hope for something in the future, and hope that someone actually cares, a hope that someone will actually understand, whatever it may be. But what can be said of hope when there is no such thing as safety? There is no safety in friends, no safety in success, no safety even in family. There is no safety in myself. It’s like there are some kind of demons in my head that won’t leave me alone. Everything good is bad, everything bad is worse. Where can I find a safe place to exist? A place that is free of internal darkness? There is no safety. There is no hope. No matter what, it’s all dark, its all dying, its all bad and worse.
Everything, everywhere, is hopelessly dangerous. The moth perches and undulates. The earth exhales. How small are the movements of the moth, how small is its all-encompassing curse which pervades all and none. How fortunate we are to be murderers! How lonely we are to be alive! Blink your eyes and flush the toilet and a truck driver swerves into oncoming traffic. There never are survivors. The moth flutters and perches. I know of a curse that extends beyond good and evil. We should stare into the barrels of our own guns. We should voluntarily sit in the chair. Those who know are those who die the slowest, most tormenting deaths. No whip or chain is needed. Birth is a slave auction by definition. Blink, sniffle, step, sigh, laugh, yell, relax. It’s all the same, living and killing. The moth perches and undulates.
No matter what, its all bad. I’ve never been able to explain myself understandably when I try to be straight-forward and plain. What does hope have to say to that?
3 comments
Hi.
I think I understand your situation, but I don’t agree with you. I think it’s pointless to try to find the bad in everything. You certainly will, if you care to, but there’s also a good side to pretty much anything. And most things make a lot more sense than it seems.
Just take hope as an example. It’s what keeps us going, even in the worst situations. You could question the meaning of life and survival, of course, but there really isn’t any, and it’s okay that way. There’s no need in digging any further. Most people simply accept it as a fact and live the one life they have (only one!), and let’s be honest: There really isn’t any point in taking your own life, anyway.
Humans want to survive, and they want to avoid experiencing sorrow. If you start from that, pretty much everything makes sense.
To your question: We don’t have safety in anything, and we never will. Just imagine a life where everything works out as expected. It would be awful. Humans are made for adaption and we’re pretty good at it, and then there’s the thing about ratio and free will and stuff.
If you decide to swim against the current, that’s amazing. But you don’t have to drag yourself down. You deserve better, anyway, and you’re not half as helpless (in the sense of powerless) as you feel. I think you’re stronger than you admit to yourself.
Good luck & best wishes
-R.
Erykah,
First off, I’d just like to say your post really made me think. Thank you for sharing these intelligent thoughts.
Remembrance is right: First and foremost, there is NO safety in any of the things you mentioned. How does that relate to hope? It may not be the answer everyone wants to hear, but I suppose hope is in the gamble we all take when we place our trust in someone. I know – it’s not ideal and we end up hurt much (most?) of the time, but I think it’s worth it to find the few people who end up having a positive impact on our lives.
To me, hope has always been EVERYTHING – especially for people like us. I have long believed that the reason for most suicides can, at the end of the day, be narrowed down to a feeling of hopelessness. Without it, what does a person have?
L4Y
(L4Y@cogeco.ca)
There are people who are blessed, some less so and some are just trashed by life/people (they certainly don’t want it that way but it just is). So hope, I think, is more possible for some than others. Loosing hope though is pretty crushing but it happens. I no longer have hope, cancer and million other things truly took it’s toll but abuse and having your hope taken away (constantly) is evil, wrong and unforgivable. I wouldn’t do such a thing to someone.