Holding on to hope against all odds

Sep 7, 2009, 12.00am IST
Marguerite Theophil.


We live in amazing times. In several parts of the world, while personal and collective acts of aggression and violence increase, in many parts, citizens resist being treated like mindless, malleable puppets.
There's a lessening of apathy and indifference, an increase of positive engagement. And in all of this, we sense how crucial it is to have hope.
What is hope? A standard definition of hope is "to feel that something desired may happen". 'Feel' and 'may' are words that denote uncertainty. How then could these words inspire confidence that what we desperately would like to have is within reach?


I much prefer the poet Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul,/ And sings the tune - without the words,/ And never stops at all."
Some years before he became president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel offered a radically sharp perspective: "Hope is a state of mind... not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation... An orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart, it transcends the world immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. ...Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.''


Hope might not hold the promise of security, but paradoxically, it enhances our capacity to live, work and ultimately transform ourselves within an insecure, unstable environment.
There are other radical redefiners: Rudolf Bahro, the German socio-ecologist and untiring activist, expands the idea of hoping to a state of being comfortable with insecurity: ''When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.''
A teacher's task is not only to engage students' imagination but also to convince them that they are people of worth who can do something in a very difficult world. We need to believe that the world can be different from what it is now. And if we don't believe the world can be different from what it is now, "we might as well quit."
Some are afraid to hope because they are even more afraid of being disappointed. So, if you have no hope, you may perhaps protect yourself from being disappointed, but the cost of not hoping is that you act half-heartedly or avoid acting; it works almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy, inviting or shaping negative outcomes.

The point of having hope in life is to always hold on to the possibility of a better life, a better world, and that gives you the energy to actively make that happen. When you have hope, you tap into and release the energy that helps you shape positive outcomes in nearly every situation.

So while hope does not guarantee desired outcomes, an attitude of hope can certainly shape most outcomes. Asked if he was an optimist or a pessimist, Havel is said to have responded: "... I'm really not an optimist because I don't believe everything's going to turn out well, and I'm really not a pessimist because I don't believe everything's going to turn out horribly, but I do cultivate hope in my heart, because it's the only antidote to cynicism, fear, apathy, and malaise."


Hoping and wishing, often mistakenly equated, are different approaches. Wishing allows me to not act; hoping insists I do.