Hope

As the New Year comes round today, most of us have probably cast off the heaviness, the burdens of last year.

This is so because, as hope returns year on year on the New Year, hope bestows, now more than ever, our present circumstances with nothing if not lightness.

Hope is the emotion that connects easily with the New Year because it’s about fresh starts, future possibilities, and inner strength, emphasizing new chances for new dreams, growth, and getting things right. For that, we are happy.

As the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson puts it, “Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering ‘it will be happier.’”

Hope’s welcomed lightness, however, invariably leads us to ponder what we ought to do in the days ahead, practically sobering us up and putting us on edge, teetering anxiously toward the other side of something we know not what.

“Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are we waiting for? What awaits us?” are some of the anxious questions you’re probably asking, says philosopher Ernest Bloch, who wrote the massive three-volume “Principle of Hope.”

“Many only feel confused,” Bloch says. “The ground shakes, they do not know why and with what. Theirs is a state of anxiety; if it becomes more definite, then it is fear.”

Hope, however, is always superior to anxiety mutating to barely recognizable fear, routing even emptiness. “The emotion of hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them,” Bloch observes.

Moreover, as writer John Berge tells us, “The point about hope is that it is something that occurs in very dark moments. It is like a flame in the darkness; it isn’t like a confidence and a promise.”

So, starting today, let hope light the dark around you, on your pains, confusion, and fears. Hope is forever lit within you.

And you can do no less, for hopelessness “is itself, in a temporal and factual sense, the most insupportable thing, downright intolerable to human needs.”

Which is why those trying to deceive us must also work with “flatteringly and corruptly aroused hope,” preaching their deceptions from every pulpit and soapbox.

Carefully assessing and judging these deceptions is a must, since these corrupted and fraudulent hopes are “one of the greatest malefactors, even enervators, of the human race, while concretely genuine hope is its most dedicated benefactor.”

At any rate, as you may have guessed by now, hope is always about the future and not so much about the past or even the present.

Which only means that we’re essentially determined by the future. “Primarily, everybody lives in the future, because they strive, past things only come later, and as yet the genuine present is almost never there at all,” says Bloch.

A caution, however. Working only on our individual hopes and dreams is a grievous misadventure. An individual can only be truly grasped by the society that formed him or her or the future society he or she intends to make.

Thus, whatever our dreams of a better life than what has been given to us are about us firmly committing ourselves to knowing and doing something about our complex society.

The society we want to end up with later, therefore, reflects the process of all of us getting there, starting with us responsibly seeking what our real hopes and dreams for our fellow Filipinos are.