If you ask most people if they would rather live with Hope than without it, odds are they will choose Hope every time. But if you ask them what Hope actually is, chances are you'll get a variety of responses. So, what is Hope? And why does it exist? In this video Gail Fillion explores these questions and more.
What is Hope? Now I don't know if you've ever asked this, but lately I've been asking it a lot. And I've been thinking about it because Hope, the essence of Hope, has been very influential in my life. And it often appears as if out of nowhere, when you least expect it - often on one of your darkest days, when you really can't see your way out, and you don't know what steps to take, and you feel basically at your wit's end.
And in my experience, when I've thrown my hands up and said, "That's it! I give up. I don't know." But I haven't really given up, I want to go forward, I want to push through whatever it is, I want to continue to go on and grow as a human being and wonder about life and find better ways of thinking and better ways of dealing. But I just have to get through what's going on right now.
And Hope (what I've called Hope) has always come to me. It's really never failed. It's always given me that boost that I needed, that extra fuel in my gas tank when I felt it was empty. So it feels to me that it's very, very important. And if it was given to the human race (and it seems that it has because it's available to us) it makes me wonder, in addition to "What is Hope?", "Why is Hope?"
I had never thought that before until recently. Why was it given to you and to me in the first place? Why was it made available to the human race? And it seems to me as I look around in Nature and the world around me, that Nature, that Creation, doesn't waste things. It doesn't make things that don't have a purpose. It doesn't put things together that don't go together.
So if Hope was created - and you know, it could have been that it wasn't, it didn't have to be here - but it was. If it was created, if was put together in the same place as us, could it be that it's very important that humans don't get stopped, that they somehow have an agent, they somehow have a companion, they somehow have a resource that they can call upon - if they're willing to try. And then that Hope comes to them and somehow together, you forge ahead and you don't get stopped, and you live to fight another day. You live to feel another day. You live to wonder another day.
And then when I was thinking of these two questions, "What is Hope?" and "Why is Hope?", a third question came to me because, if it was so important, that Hope was given to me and to you and to the whole human race so that we could continue and not get stopped, could we be that essential to that which made us that it wants us to be able to go on, not to give up, not to let all our valued efforts go to waste? It wants us to live to see another day? It wants us to continue to open our minds to the potential that we may not have experienced, but is actually there, so that we could really know and we could help make it happen that better days would be ahead - for ourselves and for us all?
And if we are that essential, could we in fact (and here's the question) could we be the Hope of that which made us? Could we be the Hope?
Now, there's a feeling that comes to me when I wonder about that...and I don't know if something comes to you. But perhaps you'd like to ponder these questions yourself, or come up with others of your own:
"What is Hope?" "Why is Hope?" and "Could we be the Hope?"
What did you think?
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