Hoping not to Hope

Life is a strange thing and as I will always point out, not of my own design. I mean yeah sure, it was I who decided to have two helping of dessert and I who decided to move to the most touristy place on the earth, but still, life is just never how we think or hope it will be. Now I am an eternal optimist though it may not seem so by my ramblings. I always look for the positive and believe that there is a reason for everything. That, if you try to be the best person you can, life will take you where you are supposed to go. Whether that means that you will live to be 104 or that you will die in a car crash at 22 makes no difference. Call it destiny or just random chance but there is something that is out of our control, and not always in a bad way. Therefore life is not of our own design for if it were, I am sure that most of us would choose to live to be 104 . But that is not the reason I am writings this time, though it does playing into it, greatly. The reason I write this time is to talk about hope, how it can be the best thing and the worst thing all in one.

Hope can give us strength to see a tough time through or give us a reason and focus to our lives. A hope can come and go quickly like a summer shower or it can evolve and change like the seasons. A hope can also be engrossing like the air we breath, all around us, with us every moment, though we may not always notice it. Hope is more often than not a good thing; a hope for a better life (seasons), the hope that the cute person across the room will look at you (summer shower), or the hope that a parent will beat cancer (engrossing). Yet hope can be bad because when we get caught up in hoping, whether for a moment, season or lifetime, we may start to rely only in hope, or we may loose hope in hoping. In certain case we may even hope not to hope, to spare ourselves from what may never come. At one time or another we all have hope, loose hope and hope not to hope. It is just how life is. For myself I hope only in moderation, just enough to help me get through the rough patches but not enough to affect my life. Sure I have engrossing hopes, but I try to let them just be there, floating around not interfering with my life. This of course being but a feeble attempt to control my own life. Yet whether we hope fully, in moderation or not at all, no one can deny that hope does not shape our lives. Especially when we hope not to hope.