Hope

If there is one form of energy that will not deplete in this world, (energy is conserved, I know) it is hope. Hope drives the lives of people. People thrive on the promise of hope, be it true or false.

You hope for a better future. You hope to get a raise. You hope to travel to Tibet to pat llamas. You hope that your crush will like you back (they already have a name for this. It's called imagination). You hope to find that lost bus ticket. You hope to arrive home safely, everyday. 

And we hope that all of this is just one long and elaborate nightmare.

Between a story of false hope and hopelessness, I'd prefer the former. Because people are naturally masochists. We deliberately hold on to false hopes. We like being tortured by hanging ourselves with the hope noose. Hope may fade away like the tip of the steam off your coffee cup, but we would wait with our fingers crossed until it finally disappears. And when it is gone, we stay on hoping that the lost hope may reemerge. Just like an immortal, self-duplicating virus, hope never dies.

To paraphrase Neil de Grasse Tyson: Once you put hope in a sentence, you are acknowledging a lack of control of the outcome.

Hope drives you mad, yet it keeps you at the edge of sanity, at the same time. 

Hope is the one thing that could kill us over and over again and we seem to enjoy it.



Here's to whatever hope there is left for the unfortunate flight of MH370.