The Paradox of Hope
The paradox of hope is that we can’t live without it and also: it can feel impossible to live with it sometimes.
Because when we allow ourselves to hope for things, it’s vulnerable. We’re risking disappointment — and most of us have a wounded relationship with disappointment. It feels like life or death.
The themes of hope, despair and managing disappointment have been circulating within the collective consciousness with a lot of momentum lately in light of all the dramatic changes to the presidential race in the US.
The question is: How do we work, skillfully, with big energies like these in our lives? How do we ride the waves instead of getting swept up in the riptide?
What’s interesting, is that as devastating as despair can be, it can feel safer to some of us than hope. Because it’s familiar. It doesn’t lift us up and promise us stuff. It doesn’t threaten us with the secret, lurking surprise of disappointment.
Despair doesn’t hold potential for an outcome we weren’t expecting or prepared for. It’s straightforward. Despair is the absence of hope. It doesn’t ask us to believe in things and risk disappointment. It just wants to cover us up, like a heavy blanket, and blot the world out. And then: yes, we’re in darkness under that blanket — but at least we know, firmly, where we are.
