kaolin fire presents :: thoughts :: hope

2000::Sep::19

I've done my best to do away with hope -- I find it an exceedingly negative concept. Maybe that just has to do with how it has affected me, personally. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what other people consider hope.. I guess that's all definitions and boundaries that I don't understand. Dunno.

What then, is hope to me? Hope is.... expectation of something intermingled heavily with the fear of its failure. Hope is, essentially, in its active form, pain. Lots of it. A quote from '97 when I first realized how negative a quality *hope* was for me: "Having your fingers crushed under the heel of a boot hurts more when they're crossed".

But, you say, what is life without hope? Have you consigned yourself to the doldrums of existence? Have you, even, perchance (well, maybe you wouldn't use the word perchance, but I happen to like it) given up existence?

To whit, no. [gods, I hope to whit is right... Not the sort of thing you can look up on dictionary.com, I think] I've not given up. I've let go of the activeness of hope that I think the rest of the world operates under. I've given up holding on to the half-believed expectation of things to come. I've allowed hope in a passive sense to permeate my being, providing a sort of glow, honestly.

That glow is the positive aspects of hope. It is the chance that good things will happen, without the worry that they won't. Why worry over something if the worry doesn't help? Then... stop. Easier said than done, but not too hard to do, at a certain level, with much conditioning. The positive essence of hope, without the fear that bad things will happen, without the fear that good things might not happen. Who needs fear when it doesn't help?