THE VIRTUE OF HOPING AGAINST HOPE

We expect much of life and of ourselves. Too much. Thus, life disappoints us and we disappoint ourselves. Life does not measure up to our expectations and we especially don’t measure up to our expectations, or perhaps, more importantly, our hopes. And so we find ourselves ultimately hoping against hope, which is to say that we still hope for an outcome in awareness that such an outcome is almost impossible, though still possible. It is the carrot that we hold before our eyes so that we asses may be on moving rather than stopping forever. We thus put a positive spin on the most dire of circumstances. I do, and I think almost all of us do since there is no choice but to keep on keeping on in light of our many responsibilities and choices and in light of our own responsibility to ourselves. We don’t have the option of walking away from, of abandoning, ourselves.