Hope & Bushido

 

 

 

Hope and I used to be friends. Maybe we still are. You know how some friendships are just rocky from the very beginning. Our relationship is like that… on the rocks.. strenuous.. there but not really there.

I envy people with blind faith. Their belief in a higher power looking after them, must be quite a relief. It takes the load off I imagine. If there’s someone up there looking out for you, then why worry.. why fret and borrow trouble from the future. After all, if it’s fate, it’ll happen, if not, then it won’t.

I envy the eternal ‘optimist’, the one’s who don’t struggle with the glass half full or half empty question. Most days for me, the glass is half full. Some days though it feels like a leaky bucket that will never fill up. And while there’s a great many things that I hope for, wish for, there’s a great many things that I know I’ll have to hustle for a long time to get. Some days I don’t want to hustle. Some days I am so tired and sick of it all that I want to just sit down by the way side and simply watch life go by.

Some days – specially the one’s where hope and I are best friends – I am a samurai warrior living by the code of “Bushido”. It’s easy to keep faith in others and to think that no matter what happens, by sheer will or strength, or the perseverance of our effort, we will prevail.

But times like now, I question if I have lost my sense of wonder, of seeing the unseen, of believing in things even when we can’t see them and they haven’t manifested yet. No one can see tomorrow, yet everyone seems to believe that it’ll be there. It’s the reason we get up in the mornings, it’s the reason millions who are fleeing war-torn countries pile into rickety boats. It’s the reason single mothers with nothing but her children, still trudge on day in day out, struggling to get by. The desperation of being homeless somehow triumphed by the hope that things will change.

That’s also one of my favorite sayings – “no matter how good or bad a situation is, this too shall pass”. The good days will go, just as the bad one’s do and while it’s easy to lose hope when we feel like we are stuck in an endless tunnel, somehow you keep on putting one foot in front of the other and the days pass, until you see the light at the end of the tunnel.

In a world gone crazy, in a lifetime that seems bleak, in the desolation of our collective loss of humanity, I find myself standing in my corner of the world, waiting to become friends with ‘hope’ again.