In fearful day, in raging night,
With strong hearts full, our souls ignite.
When all seems lost in the War of Light,
Look to the stars, for hope burns bright!”
Blue Lantern’s Oath.
The human mind is truly a beautiful and mysterious thing. What can be used for baffling scientific inventions, can also be used for pure evil.
What we think, is who we are. We hear every now and then that people are committing suicides after fighting a losing battle against depression. What most of us associate with depression is sadness combined with a feeling of helplessness. However, I don’t think this is the entire truth behind it. What most people fail to recognize is the feeling of hopelessness.
This feeling of being without Hope; is the feeling of being overwhelmed with everything that is happening around us. Maybe your world is falling apart, maybe everything that could have gone wrong has. Maybe you lost someone close to you. This drains your energy, drains your soul, and pulls you into the dark abyss of depression. You start to see the negative aspects of everything.
To put a positive spin on this, It makes you a wonderful devil’s advocate.
Hope, it is what makes all of us tick. Makes all of us do things that we didn’t think were possible. It gives us the strength to fight back when our backs are up against the wall. Hope gives us the strength to break down the goddamn wall.
Everything has a price. And especially powerful things tend to have a greater toll. Having said that, I’d like to amend the immortal words of Uncle Ben, “With great power comes great responsibility, but also greater burden to bear.”
Having a strong hopeful side to one’s personality, or even an optimistic side has its own emotional Mount Everests and Mariana Trenches. Hope is the light at end of the tunnel. But sometimes that light, in fact, can be a train barrelling down straight towards you.
Having hope in every situation is not necessarily a good thing. You might disagree on this for now, but hear me out. People who can’t handle bad news may feel comfort in temporary hope, but when the dust settles and broken outcomes are all that’s left, shattered faith acts as a catalyst to greater irritation, anger, and frustration.
Hope and faith sometimes is the thing we need the most, and sometimes it’s the worst thing that person can do to another human being. And in a cruel twist of fate, both of them can occur in the worst possible scenarios; i.e if someone is stranded somewhere, and having faith and undeterred hope that someone will save us, may be the best survival tool one can have. And if someone is on death row, and if someone dangles a chance to escape death, only to take it away, is the worst form of mental torture.
90%, maybe even more, fail to handle shattered hopes and dreams in a healthy manner. Some lash out, some have a meltdown, some get depressed. But rarely does it happen that someone comes along who sees the Silver lining, sees a map to a new dream from the broken pieces.
I urge all of you to become that one anomaly, to become that one rare occurrence.
Instead of being a Halley’s Comet, let us be the Sun and Moon we see every day.
Hope is freely available to everybody. But not everybody is well equipped to handle its dark side well. One last message before we end, to help you all…
Hope is the strongest weapon of them all. Without hope, there would be no motivation and without motivation, there would be no longing for success. And we, would cease to exist.
Stay strong, and have Hope. It’ll provide you with immeasurable strength during the darkest days.
