Jonathan Dodd’s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
I’ve been living in Hope for a while now. Of course, Hope is not a place. Or maybe it is, somewhere. But that would be a place that someone called Hope, presumably for a good reason, or because they summoned up some Hope while they were there. Not because it was actually the source of Hope.
We do think of Hope in geographical terms though. We say – ‘Hope springs eternal’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, or ‘I’m living in Hope’, and ‘Abandon Hope, all ye who enter here’. And there’s always the Cape of Good Hope, named not because of the terrible weather the sailors of old used to encounter whilst heading round the south of Africa, but because they hoped fervently to survive the journey.
We think of it as if it is a thing
Hope is a curious thing. It’s a nominalisation, in that it doesn’t exist, but because we made up a word for it we think of it as if it is a thing. Like Stress, it doesn’t pass the wheelbarrow test, because you can’t put Hope into one. You might have to go back to last year for the blog about that. It all makes perfect sense. I hope.
And we are curious creatures too. The thing that distinguishes me from my cats is that they will sit close to their food bowls and stare at me when they’re hungry. If I stopped handing out free food, they would probably go and live somewhere else. They don’t need to think about it. They get hungry, so they head for the nearest and most reliable source of food.
That thinking thing that humans do
I, however, do that thinking thing that humans do. I have conversations with myself about what’s happening, or with someone else if I’m not alone. I make plans, and work out what I think might happen if I do or don’t embark on various actions. I leave out the unlikely events, like a meteor strike, and I avoid the unpleasant ones, like being run over or contracting some dreadful disease, and end up going to the supermarket and buying cat food.
In other words, I use Hope as part of my way of getting through the day and planning ahead. Sometimes I forget that my plans are entirely predicated on the expectation of hoped-for outcomes, and then I can become dissatisfied when my hopes don’t come true. Like every week when the Lottery fails me. Maybe I’ll win next week.
That’s why a lot of us do the religion thing
We’re also a very superstitious lot. We make ourselves believe, against all the odds, that we can skew the probabilities. That’s why we look for omens, and hang on to the power of lucky charms and favourite numbers, and that’s why a lot of us do the religion thing. Praying never works, but it makes the person who prays feel better.
I was delighted to hear this week that Richard Dawkins, the wonderful and quite manically assertive atheist, wasn’t badly affected by a small stroke. What made me laugh was that the person in the Church of England who looks after their Twitter account, urged all twittering Christians to pray for him. Whether they had their tongues in their cheeks or just didn’t understand the irony, it caused a lovely storm of protest.
Signs of tunnel-ends
Hope lives in the same space as religion and superstition, because it doesn’t exist and having Hope doesn’t make any difference to any outcomes. But crucially, Hope is a precious resource that can help us enormously while we’re in a state when we feel helpless, because it helps us to concentrate on the thing we want to happen.
When we say that ‘There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel’, we don’t actually know whether there is. Saying it doesn’t make a light more likely or cause someone out there to hear us and hurry to shorten the tunnel or get some matches. But it does help us to keep our eyes searching for any signs of tunnel-ends, and we’re less likely to give up.
Lived to tell the tale
Some of our most enduring stories and dramas are based on the triumph of people in seemingly hopeless situations who have lived to tell the tale. I love the Shawshank Redemption, and the Life of Pi, and countless other books and films, because they remind me that there’s always a possibility of surviving, no matter how hard the difficulties are that we have to endure.
We also love our police procedural and detective stories in books and TV, because the stubborn and often miserable detective just won’t give up and usually solves the case. Even though it all starts with some terrible act of violence or injustice, we love the idea that the truth is out there if we want to believe enough.
Make ourselves better people at the same time
In real life, of course, this doesn’t happen very often. It is because of our striving, and our sense of responsibility to things that don’t fit into wheelbarrows, like Justice, and Truth, and The Right Thing To Do, and Hope, that we continue to do extraordinary things in the world and make ourselves better people at the same time.
Usually things don’t turn out as well as we would like, or our efforts are swept away, but we keep picking ourselves up again and carrying on towards the mythical light at the end of the mythical tunnel that we’re mythically trudging through in the mythical dark.
Hope is very hard work
We carry that light in our minds, and it gets us through the worst moments, and because our eyes are searching for light, we sometimes notice other doorways or opportunities that turn out to contain unexpected pleasures or help, or even a whole new direction to take ourselves down.
As with everything else that’s worth doing, Hope is very hard work. There’s nothing wrong with hard work, and it’s good for us. The fact that most people work really hard trying to stop themselves from having to do anything at all shouldn’t put us off. I absolutely believe that hard work undertaken with a good heart and sensible intentions is never unrewarded. I also believe that the reward never comes in the form we think we would like or believe we deserve, but is actually and usually what we need.
What have I learned from this?
The proof of surviving any hard time is to ask yourself the question – ‘What have I learned from this?’ If you can’t ask that, you’re not ready yet. If you can ask it, the answer is often quite surprising. And what was left after Pandora opened the box and all the bad stuff came out? Hope. I like that.
So I would encourage you to cultivate your Hope, and keep a beady eye on it, so that your Hopes are always grounded in some kind of reality and therefore remotely possible. And keep looking for that light at the end of that tunnel, even when you know it’s only a metaphor.
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
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