January 18, 2013

• Hope: The Bane of Happiness

  I have been wondering at my elevated levels of irritation lately. I am, often, a pretty even keeled fellow, even called lethargic at times. I don’t know if you can call me stoic because, really, I have a television in my house, but in regards to intense displays of emotion I am more to that side of things. I have spouts of irritation though, when I was young these flamed me to outright outrage and usually a stretch of black depression. Those days have been tempered, however, and I am not so sensitive. Thus it seems odd that my levels of irritation have lasted for this time. It is only of late that I recognize where it comes from; it comes from a familiar foe but one that I thought I had bested years ago-hope.

  Hope, in our modern age, has arisen to something of a star status. It is at the forefront of what we deem as a proper stance toward the world-hopeful. But, if we look historically it was not always that case, and, if anything, I am throwback in so many ways. When thinking of hope, I like to think about how our western predecessors to this strange experiment we have tried here-the Hellenistic hoards most specifically the Athenians. When they came to do what they do-war and pillage-and call it an honorable vocation, they would often give the defending people an opportunity to give up. To make terms. Usually something along the line of a percentage of their people given up as slaves, women as bed slaves, gold, tribute for a certain amount of time. In exchange the Athenians would not take more in pillage and would wouldn’t kill a large portion of them.

  This offer was given to an island city state. They refused. They replied that despite the overwhelming might of the Athenians they were going to hope for the Lacedonians to send aid. At this meeting, the Athenians replied, “They are not coming and they have not given you any indication that they will come. You are left only with hope. Hope is a pale and weak thing and only arises when one has lost the ability to change their own fate. Hope not. Use your better judgement and don’t send your soldiers to certain death and your city to flames.”

  I have allowed hope to fester in my bones. The hopes for a kinder world, for systems to produce to their stated values, for individuals to understand their power and place in this scope of suffering and its end. There is more but it hurts to gag it up any more. I am filled with such folly, such silliness, filled with such hope. Hope, can only bring about the rending of one’s flesh whether literal in the sense of the foes of the Athenians or symbolically. For, I ask you, what person with an inkling of intelligence has ever received their hopes? Oh, the mundane aspects of meat or mead have been accomplished but those are not really hopes, are they? Hopes are that which has an aspect of impossibility to them and are usually the haunts of creative men and women.

  If I ponder this idea of Hope and where it should be placed within my life, for, try as I might, it will not leave me. It haunts my being like some childhood memory that I wish to forget. I think it is a part of me much like my brain stem or some such. It cannot be removed from my being and thus must be lived with. Where is it that I can place this troublesome, innate aspect of my being, is a thought I am having now.

  Hope, I guess, would have to be placed in the external, a placement put upon that which I have only the ability to name. The indefatigable Other. However, this is not the same joyful placement that many would applaud. I strip this Hope of any expectations, I place this hope in its proper place where it can do little harm, a place where my fantasies of greatness and riding dragons reside. I place it here because of its weakness but I also place it here because of its ubiquity-it never has to leave. One could be hanging from the edge of a cliff by a tuft of grass and hope could arise that a giant eagle would swoop them up. But here, in this closet of desires, it can do little harm and keep me from being overwhelmed with unfulfilled hopes-and from the arrows of Athenians.

  What is left then without hope? One could ask this as a wondering as to how one would motivate themselves into action. Is it not the perfect ideas, or the more perfect ideas, that motivate the inert moment into action? In regards to hope, it can. But if we are to measure one’s happiness as a goal if we use hope as the brass ring to action it will fail miserably. There is something of the flavor of hope that can be used, though. It is expectation. Expectation can be used as both a means of whittling away the fantasies and as a goad to move us beyond inertia.

  An expectation of the self is the internal measure, as hope is the external. Expectation, in its better form, is coupled with honesty to be able to glare into the looking glass and understand what tools one has to work with. An honest assessment of one’s abilities, at a current state, as one can always gain more tools (although there are some innate one’s that are also there as well). In the light of these tools one can have expectations for oneself. Expectations on how to behave in situations that, perhaps, have not occured yet-bravery is often practiced in the heart’s of men and women before they are measured in reality. This measure is, when coupled with honesty, a preparation for the rigors of life.

  I have expectations of myself in this life. To be driven toward my understanding of the good and to stand up for it in the ways that my means allow. The reality that unfolds, in many ways, is not of my doing, its causes were long before I even existed. I have an internal free will to engage an external world.

  Expectations for myself, hope for the world, and in this I can shed my vanity, gain a happiness, glory in what I can do.

  Be well
  G

  • 3:58 pm
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