Why We Should Rethink the Meaning of Hope

“You have to hope. Otherwise, we’re all walking dead,” she always tells me.

“But I fear hope as it raises my expectations,” I say.

“What is life without hope,” she continues.

My good friend’s blind faith doesn’t convince me. With that philosophy, I’ve seen her crash and burn several times. Yet, she follows her intuition and presses on the accelerator in such an open, trusting way that she inevitably hits many proverbial brick walls.

But on the other hand, she recovers quickly enough to find new hope somewhere else. She is always full of energy, optimistic and the life of any room. I know she is motivated by the same optimistic mindset, but I can’t buy into it.

I’m too much of a realist, or so I tell myself. Unfortunately, I see holes in any ‘hopeful’ argument a mile off and end up not trusting enough to ensure that, more often than not, I’m not getting into inaction.

Recently, I came across the Tao Te Ching as translated by Stephen Mitchell — which Lao Tzu wrote in the 6th century BC, roughly 2500 years ago.

An interesting passage from chapter 13 on ‘hope’ immediately captivated me.

Success is as dangerous as failure.

Hope is as hollow as fear.

What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure?

Whether you go up the ladder or down it,

your position is shaky.

When you stand with your two feet on the ground,

you will always keep your balance.

What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?

Hope and fear are both phantoms

that arise from thinking of the self.

When we don’t see the self as self,

what do we have to fear?

See the world as yourself.

Have Faith in the way things are.

Love the world as yourself;

then you can care for all things.

I paused on the sentence, “Hope is as hollow as fear”. I know it’s counterintuitive to equate hope and fear, but there is some truth to it.

Both fear and hope relate to our personal preference or aversion — our attachment to the way things should be. Hope refers to our imagination of how the future should look, while fear is of how it shouldn’t be.

Holding on to the two things — fear and hope — stops us from fully accepting the way things are. And when we are attached to outcomes, we create a form of suffering within us which ultimately robs us of enjoying the moment.

The main problem with hope is that it is based on the fact that it exists in the future and thus is out of reach in the present. When we hope for anything, we generate anticipation and have our eyes focused on the future, expecting something to come that will make us happy. As a result, we miss out on opportunities that make us enjoy the present.

Also, when we hope, we build such high expectations that we become bitterly disappointed and depressed when our hopes are not realized.

My kids will arrive to visit in the next few days. Instead of simply letting myself feel the excitement, I’ve built so many alarming scenarios in my head. What if they don’t take their passports to the airport and miss the flight? Would they fulfil all the COVID pre-flight requirements? If they miss their flight, can they get another one? And so on. I’ve riddled myself with anxiety.

On the flip side, I’ve also imagined how things could be so perfect that I’ve allowed my emotional state to become reliant on what I’m hoping for and I have burdened the event with so many expectations. What if they can’t make it and I’ll have to spend the Christmas holidays alone, unable to sit around the dinner table with them talking, laughing and enjoying our favorite foods?

In both instances, I’ve not allowed myself to be grounded in the present — right here, right now.

Worse yet, ‘fear’ and ‘hope’ feed off each other. The more I hope for things, the more I am afraid. I start looking for flaws in my optimistic scenario. I became less emotionally resilient as my anxiety increased and I became more reliant on the future.

What can we do if we can’t depend on hope as it makes us not feel present or rely on fear as a driver to protect our anxiety?

Faith is mentioned in the above passage from Tao Te Ching. We can release our attachments through faith in something bigger than ourselves. We start to feel viscerally hopeful when we trust that there is a supreme intelligence out there working with us on the things that truly matter.

We feel this more significant hope, not burdened with expectations but with a certain assurance that things will work out and that we will be okay.

Elizabeth Gilbert, in ‘The Signature of All Things,’ says it best:

“There is a supreme intelligence in the universe which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery and grants us these remarkable minds so that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us, more than anything.”

Mark Twain said so famously, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

We’ve all experienced so many instances where most of our hopes and fears have not manifested. We were not assaulted by the homeless person walking back home at midnight. We failed at the job interview and didn’t get the job we pined for, but we got another one a few months down the line, which made us forget entirely about that bombed interview. We lost some money in the deal, but it didn’t destroy us.

The ‘Hope’ philosophy my friend was following is that we don’t need to know how things pan out; we human beings are resilient enough to always find a way to handle any situation in the present.

By trusting the universe and dropping our attachments, we stop putting up obstacles and instead surrender to life’s direction and flow. That is the only thing under our control and the only thing needed.

Trust that the Universe knows more about our well-being than we do.

However, it doesn’t mean we sit on a sofa hoping and dreaming that the universe will take care of our needs. It won’t! The universe is dynamic, and as such, we are part of it and its dynamism. As the Tao Te Ching says, “to see the world as yourself.”

We are the universe, and we take action in the present. So don’t focus on the past or the future. We live in the present.

Start trusting the process, and everything will work out.

Can you now see that trust and faith are bigger than hope?