Entering 30. All My Life I’ve been Searching for A Hope
All my writings here have come from the source of great pain. Perhaps it’s when you’re shattered into pieces you finally see the gems in you which was previously buried, unrecognized. But today I want to step out from ‘pain corner’ to see what another space of my head views. I don’t choose the opposite space of pain — which is joy — because currently I also don’t feel so. I’m standing now in the space of curiosity because it offers me a good question to ponder.
Where does hope begin and end?
I could not remember how exactly I knew about hope. I obviously have no memory on when I heard that word for the first time. But I know I’ve been guessing what hope looks like.
The first hope that I saw wasn’t mine. It was my parents’. I heard them vaguely when they murmured something on their prayer. I sometimes recognized my name. And sometimes that involved tears. I thought you’re supposed to be happy when you have hope, so, I didn’t understand how hope interlinked with a cry that was almost quiet, but no less painful.
Things got weirder when I saw hope sparking on their smiles and laughters, too. I recognized it when they spent time with me and watched me doing things. Hope started to be a bizzare thing to me as I didn’t understand how it could appear in both sorrow and joy. I didn’t understand how something could appear in two contradictions.
So I ran an experiment.
I thought if I was happy enough, I would find a hope. Turned out, that wasn’t how it worked. I tried the other way around — when I felt the sorrow, I thought hope would appear — lurking somewhere at the corner of my brain before finally showed up on its full form. That was also a mistake. It was so hard to understand and equally hard to find.
I kept looking.
I searched it in the words of the (seemingly) optimistic people — those who we label as seeing the glass as half-full. They seem to be very uplifting. They see opportunities, give positive predictions, or shine with the “we got this” vibe. I can sense a glimpse of similarity with hope but I don’t feel optimism has the same color as hope. I’m guessing it’s because of the predicitions. It’s the positive outlook about the future that makes optimism feels different with hope. And that’s where it gets even more interesting.
I know some people who tend to lean on the meaninglessness of life. You were born, you live, then you die. You eventually become irrelevant to many, and forgotten little by little. This is the fact — the law of nature, you may say, which applies not only to people but all living things. Death knows no exemption.
And when you’re here (and still here), that means you live in this world with full subscription, including to the various level of pain one can endure. The world is full of suffering here and there, sometimes it could feel very heavy and suffocating, as if this suffering will not end any time soon. Some of the problems also seem to be deep-rooted in a complex web where even thousands of hands couldn’t entangle it for a year or two, sometimes for decades, and sometimes for hundred of years. Even if you shrink the size of our observation to ourselves only, it’s not much of a different. We feel pain. We suffer. And in my case, I used to question if my existence was really not a fraud. It all seems so dull and not promising.
However, I want to remind you again that we’re here with full subscription. That means we have this capacity not only to acknowledge the suffering, but also the wonder and beauty the world has to offer. I think we emphasize too much about human’s tendency to always want more, and not enough talking about human inherent capacity to feel enough. That’s when you’re able to share and spare, when you lift up someone, when you go the extra mile(s), and when you roll up your sleeves to involve on the joint efforts. If we have zero capacity to feel enough, I think these behaviors should have been nowhere to be seen. This time, think of these not as a motivational guff, but try to see it as a matter of fact — because it happens. Even if you only see that in one person who actually does it, that’s enough to be taken that it is a fact. Our capacity to be kind is as real as the suffering we see.
This capacity is the engine we got inside ourselves. And I believe hope is the fuel.
Hope, I come to learn, is not a positive outlook of the future. It is not about making prediction about a promising future. Hope also acknowledges the chaos and cries. That is why hope can appear in both joy and sorrow, in madness and serenity — because hope is the belief that there is still a point in not giving up.
We often link hope with something about the future, while forgetting the relevance of hope in the present time. Hope is not something belongs to the future. It exists in the here and now. A hopeful person also doesn’t know how the future will unfold. A hopeful person cannot guarantee that it will all work out at the end. Perhaps it will. Perhaps it won’t. But hopeful people are not afraid to devote. Hopeful people hold the reason, often personal, of why they keep doing what they do despite the awareness of the destruction around them. And being without hope, as you can guess, means the person is no longer see any point in pursuing. There’s no fuel to run the engine although the engine is still there.
But knowing what hope is still hasn’t answer my initial question. Where does it begin and end?
The question itself is not misleading but I’ve been treating it in a wrong way. You might be familiar with the phrase “losing hope”. Because of this phrase, I thought hope is something you have to look for (because you can lose it). I thought you need to find it and make it yours. Again, I was wrong.
Hope is not something you can search for and find. It is something you should cultivate. What is beautiful is to realize that hope grows together with you — hence, even though in some days we might feel hopeless, you can’t lose it. If you’re still here — I mean, here — then you still carry the hope within you.
Today, I’m turning 30. They said it’s a significant decade with lots of important decisions. I want to start this new age with letting go two things: the thought that my existence is a fraud, and the thought that hope is something I have to search and find.
I stop searching for a hope because I am one.
