The Seduction of Hope

Nathan Thompson explores the seduction of hope, and wonders: if you give in to it, do you lose the improvisation skills necessary to fully engage with life as it is?

Whenever concerns about the future come up, I find hope to be like a bottle of quality microbrew after a long day. It’s usually something that’s nicely packaged, good tasting, and guaranteed to offer some short-term relief from the pain. The problem is that hoping takes us away from what’s present. And it also diverts us away from the deep source pool from which our future springs forth. To put stock in hope means to privilege an empty story over the wholeness that’s inherent in each of us, if we only trusted it more. Dean from the blog The Mindful Moment writes:

In my experience and spiritual practice I’ve found hope is not a good thing.  It limits ones spiritual development.  It isn’t good because it in fact is a very subtle form of desire and control that makes us cling to our sense of self and our suffering, prolongs our suffering and keeps us suffering.  It is an illusion of a sense of control that we don’t actually have.  Hope is nothing, it’s not even a tangible ‘anything,’ it’s just a subtle desire for a future positive event or away from a future negative event.

I’d actually say that it isn’t even about positive or negative. Spiteful politicians sometimes spend enormous amounts of energy hoping their political opponents are taken down, or even killed off. Greedy business leaders sometimes invest entire fortunes on schemes built on a hope that doing them will crush the competition. Seriously ill or seriously depressed people sometimes hope to die. Rebellious teenagers sometimes hope to fail exams, and flunk out of school. The common thread, whether the desired outcome is positive or negative in the relative sense, is that desire for control Dean speaks of. Control over what? Change.

I don’t know about you, but I have never had any luck controlling the process of changing. Certainly, I can plant seeds for the direction I’d like to go in, and shift my thoughts and behaviors to increase the possibility of that direction manifesting. And I can regulate my responses to whatever actually does occur. But controlling change itself? I don’t think so.

The other thing I actually have come to see about hope is that it puts a lock on the doors of our life. Instead of having everything open and available in any given time, you only have a few doors open. The ones you hope for, and the ones you don’t hope for.

That’s the place you’re operating from. I hope to get a job by the end of the month; I hope I don’t go broke. Either one of the two “hopes” happen, or something entirely different occurs. With the former, the pattern of belief in hoping is reinforced. The latter often brings with it a surprise laced with confusion and even bewilderment. I didn’t expect to inherit this money. What do I do now? Do I still get a job? Invest it? I don’t know. I don’t know.

In the end, when you give in to the seduction of hope, again and again, you lose the improvisation skills necessary to fully engage with life as it is.

Given that many of us live in places where hope narratives are really strong, I think that using the word “hope” can be a skillful way of supporting others. Telling someone “I hope you feel better soon” is a way of expressing care , as can be offering optimistic views of the future. However, in both cases, we can come from a place of offering that is open, and not caught up in the futurizing that comes from hoping.

I can imagine hospice workers and chaplains, for example, have to work with such language all the time, and must consider the people before them and what is most skillful in the given situation. But I think there are ways to work with really difficult situations like families facing terminal illnesses that are both realistic in the now, but which also demonstrate a deep, abiding faith in the unfolding of life as a whole.

My mother is a pretty optimistic person. But more importantly, she seems to have developed a faith that what she needs in life is always there, or just around the next corner, ready to be located. And although she gets caught up in misleading hope narratives like the rest of us, what I tend to see from her is a great trust that things will unfold in the way they need to unfold. The other day, her car broke down on a freeway ramp. She was initially irritated about it, and worried about having to get a new car. However, within a few hours, she had shifted all of this. With a friend of hers, she’d considered some of the possible outcomes, and then let it go to the mechanics to deal with. And although she had a hunch that it wouldn’t be too bad (which it wasn’t), what I mostly saw was that she trusted that what needed to happen with the car would happen, and that she’d be able to deal with it.

Faith has got a bum rap amongst many in recent generations, due to the quite limited approach to it that has been handed down to us, especially from Judeo-Christian leaders. The kind of faith I am speaking about here has nothing at all to do with the unthinking, often-fatalistic acceptance of life as being God’s will, Allah’s will, or a result of one’s karma. What I’m writing about comes from paying attention to the details of this very life, of examining what’s actually going on, and recognizing that you’re never abandoned by the world. Sure feels that way sometimes, and certainly people suffer and die in the most awful ways every day. However, as much as there are grave injustices around the world that must be addressed by all of us, so too is each of us upheld by the earth, by the very air we breathe, and ground upon which we stand. And even people living under highly oppressive circumstances, like Aung San Suu Kyi and others in Burma, recognize that there is something greater than the current political conditions, the threats, torture, and murder notwithstanding. It is this kind of deep faith that drives great social change movements, and also produces everyday awakenings in people living everyday lives.

Hope, by its very nature, can’t claim this. It is almost always about a desired outcome or set of outcomes. And a rejection or avoidance of other outcomes. In other words, it’s a divided house of cards at best. It’s a futile effort to feel better about the uncertainty that comes with living. And so, in this new year, may more people dig in deeper into the heart of this life. May the candy of hope be left on the shelves of the grocery stores and in the dusty covers of old books. And may more of us, instead, awaken to a deep faith and trust in the dynamic functioning of the great universe we live in.

Photo Credit

“Hope” bad contact, no biscuit @ Flickr. com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

Recent Nathan Thompson Articles:

• A Balm for Your Body and Mind
• The Gifts of Comfrey
• Learning in the Community Garden
• Passionflowers
• The Beautiful, Powerful Coneflower