Hope needs to be contained.

‘Hope needs to be contained.’ Although extremely dystopian, this sentence is fascinatingly poetic and has a bizarre truth and beauty to it.

Recent experiences have left me reeling and deeply contemplating about the role hope has to play in our lives. From a young age we are taught, or even instructed, to dream big and ‘hope for the best’. What happens when you dream so big and hope for such an unending period of time that you actually start losing all concern with reality? Should there be an expiry date to hopes and dreams? Just like the dystopian universe pictured in Lois Lowry’s ‘The Giver’, should we ‘regulate’ our lives according to strict conditions and terms for the betterment of our lives?

‘The bigger you dream, the harder you fall’. I’d heard of this proverb, but hadn’t quite understood the deeper meaning behind the mere string of words until recently. What happens to the tenacity of the human spirit when it keeps getting shattered and dispelled and defeated time and time again? Everything has its limit and there is a certain point to which the human resolve can be tested. After a certain time period has lapsed, even the strongest of people lay down their swords, so what then about the weak at heart?

We don’t expect a window cleaner to become president; we don’t expect a laborer to get a PhD; we don’t expect a taxi driver to own a huge corporation. So then why do we keep expecting miracles to happen our own selves? Why do we dream so big and so long that we stop noticing the small miracles happening to us every day? Everyone in society plays a role – we all have our standings and we are all divided into classes for a reason. Even our cities and towns are arranged and subdivided according to the type of people. Just like you don’t expect a janitor to own a loft in Manhattan, it’s unrealistic to expect ourselves to have the courage of Napolean or the strength of Hercules or the compassion of Mother Teresa or the smarts of Richard Branson. Luck played a huge role in whatever these people achieved. A lot of uncertainties had to become certainties and somehow the starts aligned perfectly for them to achieve what they did. These are one in a million stories – motivational speakers will never tell you that only one or two percent of people in a given demographic ever become successful. So then why do we toil so hard to attain the impossible?

Why do push ourselves to the brink of a nervous breakdown just because we are supposedly ‘never to lose hope’? It’s insane to ask every Tom, Dick and Harry to strive to be like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or J.K. Rowling – those people are geniuses, and they are not born every day. We need to stop chasing the impossible just to keep alive the mantra of ‘hope will move mountains’. Reality maybe harsh, but reality is what we have to live with when our lives are stripped down to the bare essentials, devoid of all hope and inspiration and motivation.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but personally, my hopes need to be contained. If not for any other reason than for me to be reasonably content, if not acceptably happy, with what life hands me. Whether it’s regarding relationships or careers, I need to open my eyes and my mind and see where to draw the line; I need to accept that certain things and even people, will never change no matter how much we hope they would. So the sensible thing to do in these circumstances is simply to forego hope, and accept things just the way they are!