Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today. ~ By Thich Nhat Hanh
I disagree with this statement. It panders too much to the stickiness that lies behind hope. The longing for a future that may not come. The desire for something comfortable and stable to rely on. The fear that things will “get worse.” I have written on this blog before, and continue to believe, that hope is mostly a hindrance. Thus my disagreement.
Given that many of us live in places where hope narratives are really strong, using the word “hope” can be a skillful means. Telling someone “I hope you feel better soon” can be skillfully supporting them, as can offering optimistic views of the future. That’s where comments like Thich Nhat Hanh’s above might be pointing us in a useful direction, but you have to reflect on where that might be.
We can come from a place of offering that is open, and not caught up in the futurizing of hope. I can imagine hospice workers and chaplains 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 also optimistic about life as a whole.
Optimism is different from hope in my opinion. Although it tends to be linked with hope, I think optimism is grounded in confidence and a trust in the boundlessness of the world.
My mother is a pretty optimistic person. 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 would happen.
Optimism also, in my view, is seeing everything as an opportunity to learn, to become more fully yourself. That whatever comes, there’s a way to integrate it into the whole of your life. I don’t see hope doing that. Hope is usually about a desired outcome or set of outcomes. And a rejection or avoidance of other outcomes.
Now, even the word optimism is tied to a binary: pessimism. It feels a little clunky to me as I write this, but I’ll opt to use it anyway.
As a final thought, I’d like to ask people who feel hope is essential a few questions. When you say hope, what exactly do you mean? How does it actually function in your body and mind when you hope for something? And what happens in your body and mind when you don’t get what you hope for?
Image Credit
Hope @ Flickr
Recent Nathan Thompson Articles:
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I admire you for “taking on” Thich Nhat Hanh’s eminence. I sometimes see quotations from him or from the Dalai Lama or another luminary and find myself feeling really rather oppressed by them. I have to work with my reactions to them, remembering that these figures too are human and that their sayings can be twisted and distorted at any point in the communication chain, including in my own mind. This week I have been grappling with what’s now become an old canard about how we all create our own reality….
“Can we envision an outcome yet be detached from its outcome? Or is it is just another form of attachment.? Are visions and dreams just our attachment to hoping and the outcome of our desire?”
I happen to think people can envision and dream with detachment to outcome. One example that comes to mind is how Zen Master Dogen wrote about the work of the head cook in the monastery. He said it’s the job of the cook to envision what the needs of the community will be for the next day, to prepare materials for cooking based upon that vision, and then to let it all completely go until the morning – when it would be time to begin cooking. Perhaps there end up being more monks to feed that was envisions. Perhaps some of the food goes bad. Perhaps someone dies, like you. There are endless ways the vision can be different in reality, but if you don’t aim yourself in a certain direction, it’s difficult to be and stay focused. What I’m talking about is more planning here, but Dogen’s teaching was actually to be applied to our entire lives. You need to envision and aim yourself in certain directions – and also be able to completely let go of outcomes. It’s a tall order, but not impossible.
I think the most critical issues here are the extent to which a person is taken out of experiencing the present, as well as how much whatever we label “hope” is clung to. Hoping for something isn’t a problem in an of itself. It’s just another human experience. But when it drives us out of the present, and into longing for a future that may not come, that’s when things get problematic.
This post, and the discussions I have had around hope, have gotten most tested by chaplains, and people facing death and dying – either personally or in their family/friendship circle. It’s always given me some pause. What’s the most compassionate approach? How does one support a person, while also not being an enabler of things that might bring a fair amount of suffering?
I keep coming back to the idea that it’s possible to both envision the conditions for healing, success, etc. and, at the same time, be mostly, if not completely, detached from the outcome. People who disagree with me about hope often think I’m blowing grim fatalism in their faces. But I’m not suggesting getting rid of the visions and dreams that appear in our hopes, only the sticky attachment and small desires that get in the way of experiencing our lives as they are.
In fact, I actually don’t think what we usually think of as “realistic” visions and dreams are very helpful. They mostly represent limited thinking, and an attachment to what we believe is present right now.
If I am facing a potentially deadly illness and the doctors are giving me less than 50/50 chances, it’s better to let go of that realism. As well as the longing to be healthy. And at the same time, cultivate a vision of good health that can be free to move and morph with every breath. Perhaps that vision aids recovery, and perhaps it turns into a path towards a good death, or handling diminished capacities. It’s all about allowing flow, something that “hope” doesn’t really do.
Am not sure how “mystical hope” is articulated, but if it’s something like what I just wrote, I can get behind that.
Yes, very true, Nathan. The extent to which I am taken out of experiencing the present is the issue. If I recognize that the desire to be rich, healthy, loved, or some other hope for something in the future takes me away from reality then I will be aware that it is not real.
Can we envision an outcome yet be detached from its outcome? Or is it is just another form of attachment.? Are visions and dreams just our attachment to hoping and the outcome of our desire?
If so, then nothing real can come of it. It might appear more comforting, but it is not real.
Thanks very much your reply and opinion. Though I would be the last to try to change anyone’s hope, the fact remains: it is illusion and therefore unrealistic. By definition, this surely includes mystical hope. But hope is rooted deeply in desire, which, you’ve so rightly pointed out, has many faces. As a chaplain who helps the old and infirm you probably witness the way we tend to increasingly cling to such hopeful things as religion and hope. Some would argue that this is a helpful thing, but I do not.
Have you ever read J. Krishnamurti? He was probably the most optimistic person who never gave up trying to point out this obvious fact to lunkheads like me. At times, when I quietly observe myself, I sometimes see that I tend to hope for things, even though I know it to be false.
Respectfully,
Alan
You might want to read Cynthia Bourgeault’s Mystical Hope as a way of bending this perspective you have on hope. I actually am a chaplain who works with terminally ill people on a daily basis. I have come to understand that hope is fluid. It has many faces. We hope for cure, we hope for remission, we hope for one year, we hope for one more holiday with the family, we hope to see that first grandchild born…we hope…nothing wrong with hoping…as long as that hope is realistic…none of these faces are unrealistic. But there is a mystical hope that underlies all of these realities…the unborn nature that never dies, the virgin point, the ground of being, the buddha nature…et al…check out Cynthia’s book.
Bows,
Alan
Very thoughtful piece, Nathan, and one that struck a chord in me. I now find the whole notion of hope synonymous with illusion or even delusion, in that if you are stuck in a narrative of so-called positive thought, then you tend to avoid the reality of the now in favor of some future, more hopeful outcome. The same could be said of belief, which is just desire and the hope for something that isn’t real. The human imagination is truly a formidable force to be reckoned with.