Is Hope a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?
I remember battling with this question of hope a year ago, in much the same situation: isolated at winter with a broken heart. It has re-emerged, now and again, over the last twelve months, this question of whether having hope actually makes things a lot worse. When all the world’s evils were let out of Pandora’s Box the only remedy was to release hope too, the insinuation being that hope was the thing that would get humanity through. But should Pandora have bothered? If she’d kept the box shut, would we actually be better off?
The case for the prosecution. When I think about the times I’ve been at my lowest, it’s been because I hoped things would turn out differently. When I’ve dragged out hurtful situations, it’s because I’d hoped they might change. When I’ve hoped and dreamed the hardest is when I’ve had the furthest to fall.
It is easy to make a causal link between hope and pain. If I had had no expectations about that work thing or if I’d had a low opinion of that person then the fall out would have caused me no pain – it was the hope for something different that did. Hope encourages you to create new endings and believe that they are possible if you just stick at it; it blinds you to what is really happening because it tantalises you with what you want most. Hope makes you believe that the crumbs you’re receiving are a banquet.
Without hope there would be no disappointment. Things would happen or not happen and there would not be undue emotional turmoil around it. There would be no reading into text messages or pulling apart of Instagram statistics looking for a version of fact that aligned with a hoped-for outcome. Life without hope would be stable, peaceful.
But, the case for the defence. Have I ever done anything without hope? When meeting my best friends for the first time, did I not hope for connection? When starting my business, did I not hope it would work? Did I not hope to find somewhere to live and then find somewhere? Did I not hope to get well after injury and illness and do so? If hope has been present in situations where I have not felt pain, then perhaps it is not hope that causes the pain.
While hopeful longing is frustrating and hurtful, so too is bleakness. The absence of hope, far from being a peaceful utopia is an emotionless wasteland. If you don’t think there’s any chance of getting what you want you stay in your pyjamas all day. Without hope you don’t look at staying in Biarritz for a month or start to write your book or laugh. Without hope that things can be better, things aren’t better.
The crucial thing, I think, is not to live on hope alone. Hope is not inherently good or inherently bad; it is what we do with it. If we spend our days and lives living only in hope of something else then it becomes bad – we feel pain when the real world doesn’t meet our lofty, hopeful expectations. We can become reliant on hope, overdose on it, and not be able to experience joy, or even satisfaction, in our real lives. Coming back down to the ground hurts, but it’s an opportunity to rebalance your reliance on the substance and hope healthily, rather than not at all.
