Treatise on hope and other things which accidentally come to mind

Paul requested of me to write another entry on my/our blog. Since it is common knowledge that such requests inevitably lead to bad quality in writing I would like you all to read with a critical eye and if you see something which you do not like to lay the blame with the one responsible; Paul.

Let me start at the beginning; I have not structured my argument or my treatise at all, but here it goes. Hope is innate. It is in us and can be seen as a human emotion, this however does not explain where it comes from. To explain this requires a dialectical dicussion which I will start later on. A bit of structure is already sneeking in as you can notice. First of all, however, I would like to make sure that it is clear to every reader that hope is essentially innate, because it is important for the rest of my argument. Hope comes forward from some sort of expectation of a certain upcoming chain of events, or a single event, to take a certain course. This expectation, however, may be or may not be grounded on chance; this does not matter. One can have hope of a certain course of events to take place in a certain way in the least likely situation of those events actually going to take place. One simply does not know how it will take place until the time it has actually taken place. That seems quite self-explanatory.

Hope, therefore, has its roots in uncertainty. If you do not know what is going to happen, you usually hope for the best. At least, if it concerns yourself and if you are not nihilistic and wish the best for yourself (which I think is true for most of us). I might like to add that I take out a particular hope actually, which namely is the one concerning the self. I do not wish to discuss other kinds of hope, because there are many and I have got little on my hands. I am merely doing this to please Paul.

It is time for an example; today I talked to a bum, who claimed to be a millionaire from Australia. Nothing wrong with that, except for the fact that he also thought that he was a university teacher and splendid in martial arts as well. He smashed his newly bought bong, which alliterates, onto the steps of the faculty, but he could clearly not give a rat's ass. I needed a light so I asked him one. He first needed half an hour of speaking before I could eventually get a fire from him, but at least I got what I wanted. I had not really hoped for it, because I could always smoke my cigarette later. However, he wanted to show a meek display of his martial arts skills, which was quite impressive with hindsight, because he only had six fingers. Unfortunately I was the first one to be his 'victim', rest assured it was not painful. I had hoped it not to be painful, there was certain uncertainty to what would happen, and my hope was fulfilled.

After this display, this particular person wanted to display his abilities to other people as well. I think they were college professors or something like that. Not having been introduced to him, they were rather surprised when someone started pulling on their limbs. They did not know what was up. Now, I did not hope that they would not get injured or anything. I assumed them to be o.k. in the end. I still hoped I would not get hurt in some sort of way, in whatever way possible, most likely to be caused by Dan (that was the bum's name I think, because he was hard to understand), but that did not happen. Another hope was fulfilled, at least my hope.

Uncertainty is not just the source of hope, but also of many more things. It causes humans to be inquisitive, eager to become certain of what is uncertain. It is the basis of religion and of science and seen as such they do not differ that much.

Hope and its 'mechanics' are dry material, but it can be made much more interesting when taken as a point of view on someone's actions. As some sort of goggles you put on and check out what a person is hoping for. I have hoped for several things and I still hope for other things; these things come in sizes big and small like hoping that the weather will be good up to hoping that I will life happily ever after or something like that.

However, when the expectation is very unlikely to actually take place, so the thing you had hoped for is not going happen, then it is probably best to let go of that hope. I think I myself have hoped too long for something to happen and have too lately realized that it was not going to happen, period. By doing this I postponed the process of grieving over lost hope and this postponement is not good I think.