Thought of Hope

There’s news that attracts me a month ago. It was about a mother whose son was buried under the ruins of building after earthquake in Haiti. The news stated that this lady was not giving up hope on her child’s life and somehow the child be found safely. The word to which I was attracted is HOPE.

Why ‘hope’? What’s so special about it? If we try broadening the thinking, then we’ll find that hope is everywhere; in everything we do. Let’s take example. We hope getting better reimbursement while we work hard for a company. Students hope entering the good university while they study hard in High School. Basketball Team hopes winning the championship while they sweat a lot during practice hours. Those hopes give them strength. It’s the only reasons why they keep doing the hard work, hard study, practice, etc.

Looking at the fact above, it's quite sensible if some said losing hope is dangerous. One could be so skeptic, pessimistic or even, ready to die. We can find example easily on this, let's say suicide by jumping off the building. They must be losing their hope on something. It could be love, future (as in jobs/career) or whatever. So if we don’t want to be like that, we shouldn’t give up hope. That’s the logic.

Wait! We’re not there yet. If I were asked not to giving up hope, I would prefer not to do it. You know why? I don't want my happiness and how I react be determined by something unreal. Why something unreal? Because, in my opinion, hope is just a perception created by each one of us. It’s in our mind. Why would we create it? Simply, it's to make we feel that our life is better and NOT to make our life better. I think this explains why we would kill ourselves if we lose this. We, basically, don’t feel that our life is good. And that 'feeling' makes you kill yourself. We're idiots.

To make my point clearer, let me give you an illustration. Hope is like a ship that is floating with an anchor cling to something invisible beneath the water. We don’t know if it clings well or not because we can’t see it. And here are the cases. First case, if we think that the anchor doesn’t cling well and the ship is bit shaken, we’ll probably leave the ship by jumping off it. Second case, if we perceive that anchor clings to something robust, we’ll stay and enjoy our time aboard. But the fact is we never know which one is right. We can’t see the anchor, can we?

See? Our mind is playing trick. We never know what happened to the anchor down there. The worst part is we determine our hope based on the situation. In that example, our perception is built based on how stable the ship floats. We stop working hard when we know that new recruit is adored by our bosses better than us. We stop studying when we know that only top 10 students will enter the good university while we are in 11^th at that day. But in fact, we never know what will happen in the future. Still, we believe in our hope, our perception. We really make it up.

We have a religion, don’t we? Or at least we believe that there’s a greater power than human being, don’t we? If so, just surrender every single thing to God! Nothing ever happened to us but everything did happen for us. It’s called ‘faith’. Faith doesn’t expect certain result, like a good one. It make us believe that every result either good or bad happen for us,. Yeah for our own good.

What about the mother I mentioned earlier? Maybe, just maybe, if the mother would have lost her son, I’m pretty sure that she won’t be disappointed. As she said to the newspaper,”Somehow, I know that he has the special God.” Well, she didn’t hope. She’s just having faith in God. And that’s different. What a frantic thinking!

Hey, let me know what you're thinking. :)

Adolf, Benn