We need hope. We need to believe that the world will improve. We need to believe that things will get better. Hope motivates us to be the best versions of ourselves. It comforts us during tough times. It sheds light when things seem dark. Hope is generally accepted as one of, if not the most, positive forces we possess.
However, we live in a dualistic world, where there are two sides to everything. James Clear wrote an article called, The Shadow Side of Greatness, where he cautions that:
“Success in one area is often tied to failure in another area, especially at the extreme end of performance. The more extreme the greatness, the longer the shadow it casts.”
This “shadow side” concept is not just applicable to performance and success, but to all things, internal and external. Which brings me back to hope. Writing about the “shadow side” of hope makes me feel wrong, it makes me feel dirty. This repulsive avoidance is confirmation that I’m headed in the right direction.
Hope is a desire for things to go a certain way. Hope only wants things to go right. It only wants good health, success, happiness, and for our dreams to come true. It wants everything to be good, always. It leads to grasping and clinging to the way we want things to be. Ignorant of what is actually happening, hope can make our lives very narrow. Only allowing us to feel good when things are good. Often leaving us feeling lost, angry, scared and filled with hatred.
It’s tough to realize that while we’re grasping at the clouds of hope, we’re simultaneously digging out the ground (the way things actually are) from underneath our feet. If we can secure ourselves amongst the clouds, great, until it starts to rain. And if not, we’re left exposed, falling into the hole we’ve dug. Forced to climb our way out until we get back to solid ground. Only to repeat the process all over again. Doesn’t life feel like that a lot of the time? Like we’re stuck on the wheel of hope, perpetually reaching, falling, climbing and digging?
It’s paramount to realize that when hope is embedded with an expectation of how things should be, that it’s actually fear. Hope is regularly just an attempt to manipulate circumstances. This kind of hope says, “I’ll wait until things are better and more to my liking to feel good.” Well, how long are we willing to wait? And what happens if things don’t get better? And what does better actually look like? What is good enough? Does that even exist?
So, the question is, what does hope without expectation look like?… It looks like faith.
Faith doesn’t claim to know or need to know. Faith makes no assumptions. Faith is moving forward into the darkness of the unknown without needing to turn on the light. Faith says “I’ll love you no matter what”. It means opening up with kindness and love to the worst parts of our experiences, trusting our ability to meet each moment with grace. Sharon Salzberg describes it so eloquently in her book, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience:
Faith enables us, despite our fear, to get as close as possible to the truth of the present moment, so that we can offer our hearts fully to it, with integrity. We might (and often must) hope and plan and arrange and try, but faith enables us to be fully engaged while also realizing that we are not in control, and that no strategy can ever put us in control, of the unfolding of events. Faith gives us a willingness to engage life, which means the unknown, and not to shrink back from it.
Again, we need a hopeful mindset. I’m not anti-hope. In fact, I rely on it. But, I’ve been trying to shift it from hope embedded with expectation and clinging to more of this faith based hope. I often find myself having the thought “I wish things would just go back to normal”. Hoping and waiting for the day my leukemia goes away, so I can finally get back to my old life. This hope has been blinding me. It had me stuck, waiting to get better. The openness of faith, not hope, recently led me to the realization that I actually don’t want to things to go back to the way they were. I realized that I already am better. That I don’t have to wait, I’m already there.
Faith often masquerades as hope because we think faith has to be religious. It doesn’t. We don’t have to practice any particular religion in order for us to have faith. It is possible to have faith in ourselves. It is possible to have faith in each other. It is possible to have faith in a better world without needing to manipulate it to match our desires.
Faith has always been a little foreign to me… It seems to me faith looks a little like acceptance. Is the difference where the center is placed in the 2 cases? Acceptance centers on the self and relates the universe to the self, whereas faith centers on the universe which also includes/is the self? If acceptance is used in the former case, is acknowledge a suitable word for the latter?
I think acceptance and faith are very much related. They both center around seeing things exactly as they are and meeting that head on. They differ a bit, for me at least, in the sense that acceptance usually takes place after the fact, where as faith is more about recognizing our ability to meet things presently in the future. To acknowledge and to accept again are very similar, in my opinion. I think acknowledgement lacks a little bit of the all encompassing nature of acceptance. Acknowledging is the first step to acceptance. But it connotes recognizing, not necessarily the welcoming or embracing of acceptance.