Don’t give up hope

Hyderabad: Sometime ago an associate had accidentally fallen off a stool while clearing a loft and broken his back. I didn’t know about this till I called him for a job I wanted him to do. I was shocked to find the ever energetic and driven person so utterly despondent. “I am lying in bed staring at the ceiling all day,” he said.

Understandable, but what bothered me was that he did not give himself the chance to hope that things would be better, that recovery might take time, but that there would be happier and healthier times in the future.

Hope is one of the biggest drivers in life and doctors rank hope as a vital ingredient (besides treatment and rehab) for conquering the most serious of illnesses. As Vietnam Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better we can bear a hardship today.”

Nature provides us with enough examples of hope. Even a single season can symbolise hope and happiness but it does not mean that the rest of the seasons are hopeless or useless — each one leads up to another and represents a crucial phase in the scheme of things. Can we reap a bountiful harvest at Sankranti if we hadn’t sowed the seeds in the months before?

If we didn’t have hope of success, happiness, or times together, would we marry the person after our heart or pursue the subject or career of our dreams, or build the kind of house that we always wanted to live in or would we even save for the future?

Bad times do punctuate our lives but certainly they don’t last forever. They might stretch for what seems like an eternity but the tide does turn eventually or we become seasoned and mature in the process.

As adults we should know better than behaving like children who need instant gratification and who simply must be obliged with everything that they want at that immediate instant.

Not getting what we want should not result in losing hope and our belief being shaken. Maybe we did not pray with the right intention or motive, maybe we asked for the wrong reasons, maybe what we wanted was not in line with the Divine will and plan and there was a better one, or maybe we needed to learn a lesson in patience, strength and forbearance.

Also great things take time to accomplish. Rome wasn’t built in a day was it? Nor does an oak tree materialise overnight. There are stages that need to be crossed, each of which is essential to one’s evolution.

However bleak a situation, the supreme offers hope for the hopeless. If we abandon all hope it is tantamount to discounting the Divine and all the promise that life holds. Which is certainly not how life is meant to be.