tricky hope

It seems that almost every commonly adapted social convention defies the progress of human evolution. If you're hungry you eat, if your thirsty you drink, tired you sleep... but what happens when you're unhappy? So many of us stay in unhappy situations for much too long and I suspect we aren't even conscious about what exactly is it that motivates the decision? I here the word hope thrown around like so many other words whose meaning have become diluted by overuse and whose origins are somewhat obscured. Hope is a tricky promise that necessarily denotes tomorrow.

Hope comes from reason. Or more accurately our ability to reason with ourselves and our own attachments. Hope has very little to do with the heart or our true nature. A hungry person will not rely on hope to bring food tomorrow for long. Hope is subversive, it's a word used to mask the disappointment of a present situation that is failing. It is a word that softens the hurt of reality by inducing a dreamlike state of what will come soon, so soon, any day in fact.

How would we explain this to Modern Man. There is something so inherently perfect about our impulses and our ability to intuit what works and what does not work, it is a mechanism that we developed over several thousands of years. And yet we find ourselves feeling miserable and sitting with that dis ease. Whether it appears in relationships, friendships, at work, in our own bodies, with our place in life, etc... all of these truths are somehow whitewashed with an illusion of hope, hope for change, hope for happiness, hope for a raise, hope to work less, a new car or thing(!), cooler friends, to lose 10 pounds, to be or have something else than exactly where we are or what we have. With hope to save the day suddenly the heartbreak we face gains a new luster, one that sparkles distractingly and which we can attach to rather than find the courage to face the music and change the things that are making us unhappy. Hope is deviating, obfuscating and dishonest.

It takes courage to be vulnerable, to breath through the parts that are uncomfortable all the while knowing that you are safe and perfect and will come out of the other end alive, lighter and more liberated from what enslaved you but-is-not-you. In honoring the human beings that existed before us and that have delivered us to this point in human history we must emancipate ourselves from dogma and evolve. This means releasing the thing that is inhibiting us from our evolution or changing the way that we interact with it altogether. There is no room for hope in freedom. And there is really only freedom in the universe which created us. We will return to freedom whether or not we are aware and whether we go kicking or screaming through life, begrudging something new at every turn, or accepting conventional bondage and obfuscating our very happiness though we have the power not to. How beautiful it could be to return to our origins with grace, ease and gratitude, and an honest acceptance of the unbound spirit that we are. This is an honor the yields from no accomplishment. This is the intelligence of creation.