It Helps To Be Hopeless

I hope this gets read. I hope it’s well received. I hope it adds perspective. I hope this intro paragraph isn’t too annoying.

I encountered this confusing thought in a book I’ve been perusing over the summer, and felt the need to flesh it out.

Welcome to America, where the best thing, is the next thing. Truly, our deepest desires are always just around the corner, waiting to be had.

We’re raised on this fallacy called hope. We wait till Christmas and hope we aren’t on the naughty list, we read our religious tomes in hope of a better afterlife, we hope we made the team.

Hope is not to be confused with ambition. Although, the two are within the same vein, the difference being that one is a blood clot, and the other a steady flow.

Our legs broken by the brash nature of existence, we hobble from one day to the next on a rickety crutch called hope. At this point I’ve probably punctured all that is considered objective truth, so let me explain.

Hope is a useful tool, if used in the proper context. After applying for a job you can only hope while awaiting the call back. But, after meeting someone recently and telling them “I hope we stay in touch,” I realized the ills of this concept.

Hope is just ambition bogged down by inaction. I stopped “hoping” to stay in touch and texted them. Similar to what Yoda once said : “Try there is not, only do.” Misplaced hope is a dangerously stagnant mindset. It’s far too easy to sit around hoping for a light at the end of the tunnel, when all we have to do is flip the switch. It was there all along.

As you go about your week, hope for the best, hope to make changes, hope to always be learning. But more importantly, cultivate these hopes so that they grow into ambition, no longer plagued by inaction.

It’s too easy to forget what we have by getting lost in hope for what’s next.

-M