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Is hope the flip side of hopelessness? It can be but not necessarily. Possibilities continue to exist. You just have to look for them. More so have faith in the greater good. We really don’t know what will happen. Alexander Pope describes this kind of Hope in “An Essay on Man”:
Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore!
What future bliss, he gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
Mortality is our great Sensei. We have only so much time to make life count, and to make a difference.
I’ve heard in the past: Hope is dangerous. Hopelessness arises in the unfulfilled hope, uncompleted expectations, and our regrets. Perhaps, hope and hopelessness are two sides of the same ideological coin. Rather, they might be mutually exclusive, when we accept the consequence of our actions.
Maybe, like love, there exists different kinds of hope. The dangerous hope is the one that yearns and suffers in unfulfilled expectations. It’s holding on to what’s passed. Attachment will betray the intention of hope. That ends in hopelessness, in despair. Hope, like possibility, is useless unless I take action and let the chips fall where they may.
There’s no winning, no losing in hope. Bruce Lee said, “You only want to know the way to win. Never the way to lose… Learn the art of dying.” Alexander Pope proclaims hope as the blessing in the present, not in the future, not in the aftermath. Ideally, we hope in freedom.
Wonder is the resilience of hope. Given to resilient hope: Have faith that even in failure life continues, and that you can have hope again. Resilient hope gives rise to what’s possible. It can be the blessing of what is infinite in nature. The blessing sees the wonder of the goodness in others, and the possibility of the brighter day. I discovered this in finding my current job. I discovered new purpose in dedicating to Aikido weapons training. Enduring and having the resilient heart give purpose. They fill my soul.
I see the resilient hope in the #Metoo revolution addressing the sexual abuse across all culture. Complexity emerges from the chaos of the courageous victims calling out their abusers. Yet, as Actor and Director Jodie Foster says of those abused, “They just want it to stop.” We all do.
This is our ‘Come to Jesus” inflection point: We all need to practice compassion. Practice authentically getting other people, and recreate what’s there in them within us. Practice kindness for others and for us. Like my spiritual twin Dolph Lundgren said, “Learn to love yourself.” I believe to take on healing the world, we must heal ourselves. Be kind to us. Love us.
Make compassion our natural self-expression in dedicated practice. As Sensei Dan would say, “Everything natural.” Natural takes practice and training.
Hope need not devolve into hopelessness on the wondrous journey. Accept that we will win. Accept that we will lose. We’re inspired by the reliance and hope of the students from the Parkland school shooting. They are called to action, and making a difference. That’s the blessing of hope in the present.
So I do my part. I hope is that as Aikido Sensei I can alter the world for greater, training students to be greater than they know. O-Sensei believed that peace in the world exists with those who train in Aikido. O-Sensei’s Warrior gives life to all things and assists in the completion of everyone’s journey. My hope is that those I teach become the greater Sensei than me. That the world will be greater, because they are a part of it.
“Hope springs eternal” when it’s not all about us. Hope springs eternal when we dedicate to making others greater, and making the world greater than when we came into it.
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This post was previously published on the author’s Facebook timeline and is republished here with his permission.
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