The Long Road of Hope

Life's Lessons - Joseph Mattappally

One day I asked my friend, why all this struggles in life? He took no time to reply, “In hope.” It dragged me into a den of wild thoughts on hope. He should be right because whatever we do is filled with fragments of hope. We live in hope; hope of being something or reaching something. We know, without hope existence is meaningless. A brief note on the relevance of hope is seen in the Greek mythological story of Pandora’s Box. Zeus created a box that contained all manners of evil; and as Pandora opened the box, in spite of the instruction not to, all those evils except hope which lay at the bottom of the box were released into the world. Hope was slow to move. 

 According to Bible, hope is ‘a strong and confident expectation’ and even salvation. Psychology explains it as a belief in a positive outcome or an emotional state with the feeling that what is wanted can be had. Some investigators argue that hope comes in only when situations turn dire. Psychologist Dr Charles R Cynder believes that hope is something to be cultivated by setting a goal and trusting that it can be reached. Hope cultivators keep whispering, ‘I can’, ‘I can’.  There are great people like Richard Rorty, who argues that our concepts of social hope are to be redefined. He asks us to be aware of ’false hopes’ which are sure to end up in extremely unlikely outcomes. Mulla Nazruddin the mystic shows us what false hope is. One day he heard that an animal race is organized at the king’s palace yards. He rushed to the palace with his ox. As the contestants lined up he also came in to the line of horses. "Have you gone mad?" asked the manager. "What chance does an ox have against horses?" "You talk that way because you do not know anything about my ox," said Mulla. "When it was a mere calf it could run almost as fast as a pony. Now that it is older it should be able to run even faster."

Personally I endorse the views of Alfred Adler, who said that we cannot think, feel, will or act without the perception of a goal. Snyder but goes further and defines hope as the sum of the mental will power and way power that you have for your goals. He says that his definition contains three underlying concepts: goals, will power and way power. According to him, the goals involving hope fall somewhere between an impossibility and a sure thing. We know that will power is the driving force in hopeful thinking; however it depends on how well we understand our goals. As he explains it, way power shows one’s ability to plan through a goal. Researchers have even introduced hope scales to measure the intensity of hope. It measures a person’s intended succession in congruence to their goals.

Dr. Barbara Frederickson fixes hope in moments of great need. She says that hope breeds positive emotions of happiness joy, courage, and empowerment which come from four different areas of one’s self: cognitive, psychological, social and physical. Whatever, at a time when people lavishly invest in hope markets, it would be appropriate to learn the interest rates too. With right healthy hopes, struggles turn to successful attempts and every act becomes milestones to our goals. The more we go into hope the more we understand that hoping too is an art.  

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