Chasing hope

My father had it all laid out. He hoped that at least one of his children would become a medical doctor, one would become an engineer and one would become an attorney. At some point in my life, he hoped that I would be the attorney. I hoped that I would become a biochemist, though I didn’t quite know what a biochemist did. So, I spent years planning to become something that I knew very little about, in the hope that I could develop all necessary skills and will myself to a dream that I now know was neither necessary nor possible.  For those years, I chased hope, and on many occasions in my life, I have chased hope, thinking that I could turn an obvious impossibility into a possibility, listening to my heart even at times when I should have been listening to my head, and listening to my head when I should have been listening to my heart. The reality that I struggle to accept is the totality of my humanity which, by its very nature, makes me as imperfect as I truly am; my existence in an imperfect human body that struggles with the realization that some things may never be possible, however much I desire them.  Yes, the realization that I am not half-man but all-man, and my hopes, therefore, may not always land on a bull’s eye.

Hmmm...I know. How dare I, an American, say that something is (or was) impossible when that would be contrary to the American ethic and belief that anything is possible if one sets his/her mind to it? Or, how could I, a Christian of African descent, be  expressing something that is contrary to the Christian belief that all things are possible? Well, I am not delusional. I have a very good understanding of the specific context in which the Christian idea that all things are possible was first used. I am not Abraham and this is not that context. I also clearly understand the whole idea of self-motivation to propel oneself to success. However, I am not inclined toward senselessly casting myself as a superhero or as one with powers that reside only in the domain of the Almighty.  Why is it that I can never stay up for several nights in a row without sleep when I feel a need to do so to complete projects that I am working on? Well, some things are possible and other things aren’t. That’s exactly a fact of life. It would be great if I could be a soccer player now and dazzle the world with skills never seen on the World Cup stage. But that will never happen because, at my age coupled with my history of never having before been a skilled soccer player, it is impossible. Only a delusional mind or a baselessly hopeful individual would say otherwise.

So, we grow up hoping to be something that we are unlikely to ever become either because we do not have the skills, the resources or the opportunity, or we just don’t work hard enough to translate hope into the kind of action that produces desired results.  Even when these elements are present in our lives, we sometimes do not accomplish some of the most life-fulfilling things we hope for because realizing certain hopes depends on the cooperation of someone else. So, even when we hope alone, our hope can falter on its way to realization because it was a hope that needed someone else to play a role in the aspect of our lives covered by that hope. What do we say then when this is the case?  Do we fold and give up on our hopes, modify those hopes or keep hoping? Of course, it depends on the circumstances and the players in that space. Those who genuinely love us, and who we truly love, will always be the dependable collaborators and support that we need in our travels down the lanes of hope, even when we feel that they no longer earn the quality relationship that we had with them.

In our youth, we think we have the world all figured out and we know what our elders don’t know, even though the elders know everything that we know, and more.  The cockiness that is associated with, and attends to hope is more evident in youth, but also in states of ignorance. In our youth, we hope to grow into careers, earn enough money to have very comfortable or, in some cases, lavish living.  We hope to be richer, more successful overall, and worldlier than the older people that we know, including our parents.  As ignorant adults, we hope that everything we choose to do will result in the outcome that we desire, either forgetting or not realizing that hope is only one step in the pursuit of attainment.

Hope is not reality. It is a wish to accomplish a higher level in whatever life situation we desire to change. We wish because we are human and we hope because, again as humans, we are conscious of the possibilities that exist in the environments and spaces in which we live and act. That consciousness creates in us aspirational tendencies, which we can have.  However, we are not granted the ability, nor are we subject to the wishful circumstances in which hope automatically converts itself to gain. The world in which that is possible does not exist because, although we may hope alone, we do not live alone in our world. Instead, we live in a world where we see and know other people who have attained the kinds of quality of life that we admire and desire for ourselves.  Ours is a big world in which we love and maintain connections with others at whom we may sometimes get angry and disappointed but are nonetheless important to us and are in our lives for a purpose. Yes, we live in a world in which our ability to succeed often requires our understanding of, and our willingness to embrace our interconnectedness.

We spend much of our lives chasing hope and less of it evaluating and/or re-evaluating the substance of our hopes.  Yet, some hopes are baseless because the ingredients to support them are either completely absent or insufficient in our lives or around us.  For hope to be realistic and realizable, it must have a basis. Baseless hope may have the same emotional effects that hope of any kind naturally generates but, ultimately, it is of no greater value and of no more significance than shifting sands.  To that extent, hope that is not, or cannot be framed on or within a structure is only a wish; a baseless one.

The same principle is true for individuals as it is for communities and nations.  It is not an accident that most ultra-religious nations in today’s world are failed states. They are filled with clerics and political operatives who push hope while filling their pockets with money from the hopeful.  While they are doing that, less-religious countries are developing their societies on well-constructed and realistic hope. Such is the hope that is attended by selflessness, a sense of responsibility, a desire to create a better world for posterity and now, and an understanding that those who push hope without providing the support needed for its realization are fraudulent cultivators of wishful thinking.

We must desist from spending so much of our lives chasing hope and spend more of our time planning realistically because an unstructured chase makes elusive even the otherwise possible. While we hope, we must also build the infrastructure for the realization of those hopes. Since hope is not static, the chasing of it ought to be strategic. Otherwise, we hope in vain.