Wild Flowers

We sat together on the balcony as the evening was falling. The birds are silent now and it is dark. It will stay dark until tomorrow morning. I like this darkness. My heart rejoices the silence. The quietness of this saturday evening. We are not going anywhere. We have spend time on rebuilding the shelves for our music collection. “En passant” we did some dance steps. We will dance again, as Willemien has been wishing for so long already. She lost hope, but we will wait&see. Now we both are writing, doing our daily homework.

Losing hope might be a desaster. We are inclined to think that life without hope is impossible, desperate. Maybe, if there is some faith and love left, we could survive without hope. But without hope, there is no future. That’s the common way to feel sinking away in despair, if we would lose hope. A kind of giving up, surrender, dying. But perhaps we should have a closer look at what we call “hope”. We can hope as having a wishful, magic expectation of some change of things in the future. A doctor will heal my disease, God or Lucky Luck will make me Happy again, things like that.

And there is a realistic hope, based not on phantasy, but on real possibilities in an ongoing process of change, in which I have engaged myself together with others. Here it is not The Docter, The Master, God or Providence that intervenes as the Ultimate Saviour. But the creative, energetic and joyful interplay of forces in process, that permanently brings about unexpected changes not as a result of my planning or expectancy, but as a gift of the interplay between the Real, the Others and my own “patient” input. No need to wait for Lucky Luck or the Master to Be Happy. But enjoy yourself in joining the playfield of Life.

So, losing my magical hope, would sadden me first but then make me feel a wiser man, who knows to be liberated from an intrinsically false form of hope. But loosing, or loosening myself from realistic hope does not necessarily throw myself back into the darkness of despair about being futureless. It does force me back into the Here&Now. Living without realistic hope means that you have to focus on living in the Here&Now, accepting fully your self just as you are: all your impossibilities, pains, fears, incurabilities, desperations etc. included. Here&Now You are OK just as You Are. No need for acting the Big Functional Organizer to exercise in Being Happy in the Here&Now.

To finish my thoughts on “loosing hope” for tonight I commend you to read T.S. Eliot’s poem “East Cooker” in his Four Quartets. Please, read that poem, slowly, like you would drink an exquisite wine, ad fundum. Here I will only refer to the following lines:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.