Where there is hope, there is life.

“Pandora just couldn't stand it any longer. She had to find out what was in that box. She hurried to the table on which the box rested, unlatched it and opened the lid. Out flew all the elements of life (most of which were evil), except one. Pandora, horrified, quickly slammed the lid and latched the box, trapping the last element inside - HOPE.  This hope was trapped inside every human being to survive against all the evils that escaped the box.”

This is a small extract from Greek mythology, hence signifying how evils entered the world and how we are still surviving with the hope left in the closed box.

 Each time we think of “hope”, we get different contexts which fit different “hopes”.
“I hope it rains tomorrow..”
“She shouldn’t lose hope against the budding cancer cells in her body..”
“I hope we meet again..”

Human nature is restless. Something keeps reaching out from within us towards the future, towards that which is out of our grasp, which is ‘not yet’. We keep striving, with a vague, blind passion, not knowing what and how such longing is going to be satisfied, and when. Unlike some congenital drives like hunger and self-preservation, this indecipherable drive seeks to engage us at a deeper level. In our quest for the ‘not yet’ we give ourselves some utopic ideas, visions and objects, believing that through their fulfilment our inner thirst will be quenched.

Ideas at first considered monstrous or ridiculous or ominous gradually become what people think they’ve always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, maybe because it’s compromising: it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly fanatic in a way it no longer is; and it recalls that power comes from the insignificant brinks and shadows, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, in the backstage, not under the limelight of centre stage.

 However, given the dehumanizing effects of our technological age with its tilt towards annihilation through mass destruction, an optimistic view of humanity’s future is questionable. The limits of human hope are exposed in their very denial. As a result, the human race finds itself trapped in an unacknowledged conspiracy with the forces of hopelessness that destabilizes the anticipation of a benevolent human future.

Our opponents would love us to believe that it’s hopeless, that we have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that we can’t win. Sometimes -- most of the time -- life can seem a bit disappointing. Even the greatest lives are full of profound loss and heartbreak.  It seems that pain is inevitable, and while we may say that we know good can come out of it, what hurts still hurts. In the process, one can quite easily lose hope in life, in God, and even in oneself. Despair is often cyclical, spiralling one into depression and helplessness, leading to even greater despair. The result is that one sad thing leads to another and so on, until we feel that we can't possibly break free. It can all be a bit too much for our souls to handle. Hope is a gift we don’t have to surrender, a power we don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. There are other good reasons though.

The popular adage "God helps those who help themselves" speaks of shattered dreams and lost hope. In other words, hope—this essential element of human existence—has its own antithesis: hopelessness. While hope includes confidence, hopelessness thinks that nothing can be done and is worth doing. Since not every disappointment leads to despair and often—by delivering us from illusions—to greater maturity, we can ask what it is that must be relinquished so that hope is lost? We must understand that “Hope never abandons you, you abandon hope.”

Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it is going to be fine without their involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position, that their involvement would ruin everything; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand, which are under our control. We may not, in fact, know them afterwards either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone. On first glance, we may define human hope then as an inner striving towards a distant, sometimes even an unattainable object that seems presently out of our grasp. Whether in each instance this hope is attached to a personal goal, to an ideology or to a belief system, is for the moment less important than the perception that hope is a phenomenon peculiar to human existence. To properly understand what hope is, we need to know what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and destruction. It is also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse one.

How could one live without hope? In the darkness of life's hole, one is trapped in one’s own fear and worries unless one has hope. It is a refuge from fear and terror, a shield that blocks fear or thought of unlikely odds as though it was a ray of light coming from never-ending darkness.  As humans, we need hope. We can't live without it. It is the lifeblood to our spiritual survival, and the only thing that pulls us out of the deep trenches of the pain in life.

Life, as we all know is full of hard realities. At the same time life has its bright side also. Life is an ideal mixture of success and failure where nobody is neither entirely successful nor entirely a failure. If we fail once, the next time we may succeed. It is always better to hope for the best and at the same time, be prepared for the worst.