Hope. The four letter word to begin or end all other words. With it, we can achieve anything; climb mountains, voyage valleys, soar into the heavens. Without it, nothing seems worth doing. Love, empires, and lives have all been lost with its wind taken out of the sails.
One of my favorite quotes comes from Tom Bodett (yes, the “We’ll leave the light on for ya” guy). I first heard this quote from my mentor around the start of covid when I asked him why everyone was having such a hard time coping with the beginning stages of lockdown. His answer was, “they say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for”.
With an ounce of hope, perseverance seems easier. It’s importance can’t be overstated. Otherwise, what is the point to anything? Why would we accept self-sacrifice and perceived losses if it weren’t for the promised notion of something more or a future conquer. It guides us morally to make, and stick to, our decisions to obtain our desires. We pay our mortgage because we hope that in the end we’ll own our home and have a large asset that will hopefully hold us in our golden years and beyond. We deny ourselves some comfort in an effort to save or savor some promise of a future want being filled. We discipline our children because we hope it will teach them the structure they’ll need to achieve their own hoped for dreams.
Without hope, all is for naught; the drive extinguishes and can become oppressive. Relationships disintegrate when love is not reciprocated and the hope of it happening fades out of sight. Hope of the taste of victory keeps us ascending to the top of the Mt. Everest, but when hope of victory is removed there’s nothing left to strive for. Inspiration, dedication, and fortitude are hard to be found.
Lamentations, the book that holds all the laments of the lamenting people, says, “So I say, “My strength has perished, and so has my hope from the Lord.” We suffer physically and mentally when we find ourselves without hope. The book of Job may very well be the best look at hopelessness and offers visualizations such as “He uprooted my hope like a tree”, “my days are swifter than a weavers shuttle and come to an end without hope”, and “water wears away stones, its torrents was away the dust of the earth; so You destroy man’s hope”. The will to get up or go on seems lost and useless. The spirit, incapacitated without hope, wailingly indisposes the brain and body. Proverbs says it best in chapter 13 verse 12, “hope deferred makes the heart grow sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life”.
Philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas approaches hope as a good object that is difficult yet possible to attain. He gives a contrast of hope as despair. Despair occurring as the object has become impossible to attain. He further divides despair into three main kinds: sensual, due to forfeit of the future (sluggish, from lack of effort), and sorrowful (a consequence of overwhelming fear). Without the belief that a goal can be attained, there’s nothing left but despair and grief.
Erik Erickson, a prominent child psychoanalyst, stated it more as a mutuality that must exist between the recipient and the provider, and most importantly, the growing sense of separateness that brings the desire to try to claim the “paradise forfeited”. Erickson’s belief was that without this basic trust being formed in early development that establishes the belief of the attainability of the individual’s deepest desires and missing out on this early life step would make it nearly impossible to connect to a higher power later in life, much less trust other’s. Hope attainment fosters trust, and without trust hope is destroyed. He once said, “he who has seen a hopeless child, knows what is not there”.
Feeling hopeless?
Science has found a “hope molecule”; or myokines. Myokines are chemicals that are secreted through muscles contraction into your blood stream that travel to your brain and act like antidepressants. In addition, chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins are also released in physical activity. Before you accept your hopeless fate and begin picking boils with a piece of pottery shard, science suggests you get up and move your body. When you find yourself feeling low and at the end, remembering that you’ve made it though before. Take charge and dictate what your physical body can do. Making it work for you may be all you need to make it through to the other side. Establish wins, build trust with yourself, and keep faith that hopeless isn’t the end.