Hope

Beside every mind that dares to dream walks the spectre of disappointment.

It is the impossibility of precision that results in overshooting or undershooting every target, as every desire is exaggerated in proportion to our want of it and our confidence in acquiring it. What follows is the consequence of this inaccuracy which hangs over man as both a benefactor and a blight we call: hope.

It is this inexorable particle of life, that pushes all things forwards into final conclusions and inflates existence with its, mostly, deceitful winds.

Hope, when considered superficially and through the distorting lenses of ego and fear, can be thought of as a positive manifestation of the desire to live, whose loss no man could endure for long. When considered further it is also the sinew which attaches us to desire by imprisoning us behind walls of expectation, driving us to willingly submit to that which, in our mind, can facilitate the expected and even make us relish our submission to a favourable misrepresentation of probability.

I've been told that: ?'Where there is life, there is hope' and along with it, I would add, all the accompanying pains and sufferings which this naturally entails and that are, most often, ignored or denied. It is perhaps ironic that when things are at their most unpromising conditions that the rainbow of hope makes its most vivid appearance forcing us into our most vehement striving even in the face of insurmountable odds. From this perspective it loses its magical veneer and becomes just another survival tactic which maintains the desirability of life by rolling incessantly the dice of chance.

Kazantzakis urged us and maybe bragged a little when he wrote: "I hope for nothing, I fear nothing; I am free". Yet, how many of us possess the courage and strength to truly be free?

Intertwined within the fabric of every human being, of every living entity, lies the innate string of need that often manifests itself in fear with which nature weaves her tapestries and binds us to her mechanisms. To sever these strings, to any extent that this is possible, is to cast ourselves into the void of happenstance without any stability or comfort and this ?'disengagement' along with the resulting responsibility, fills man with anxiety. No human, in the present form, could fully accept the entire breadth of liberty and all the ramifications it entails.

"Hope is the last to die", it has been said and this because it perishes with the slow attrition of time and the consistent degradation caused by life's woes. Most grasp upon hope even in the rasping of a last breath, while the few eventually reach a stage, usually in their twilight years, when hope wanes and the fear of death diminishes, leaving behind either an honest indifference or a quiet acceptance of the inevitable. It is then that freedoms boundaries are brushed-up against and the mind experiences the sublime wonderment of complete disinterest with ones own fate which opens the gates of transcendence.

The paradox in the entire matter rests in that as indifference increases the acquisition of what is or was desired, to whatever degree, is made easier by steadying the hand that reaches with the removal of the stress and the nervousness that shadows every desire and need. It is as if we are made worthy of that which we least want and that which is more accessible to us, making man nothing more than a tool of overcoming and unquenchable ambition.