Recently, I went to India to visit my mother’s relatives and to enjoy a bit of sun, spices, and shopping. I ate a lot of food, I did a lot of shopping with my mother, and I spent a lot of time groaning about the heat, and I learned that hope is the most beautiful emotion.
But more than that, I felt so much gratitude in my heart and mind for the life that I had been gifted. I saw the way people in India live.
They are happy, yes. But they also live really hard lives.
Some of them are working in really harsh conditions, under the blazing sun, doing back-breaking construction work. Others are using all of their sinewy muscles to ride these cycle rickshaws, filled with hundreds of pounds of material.
Indian people have such an abundance of hope for the future. No matter where they were, what they were doing, or how they were living their life. It truly was a thing of beauty. I wanted to share the experience with you.
Without Hope, Life Is Dull And Brackish
I think hope is one of those things, if you lose it, you lose that tenacity and joy for life. A lot of people in the Western world have lost hope for the future. We see all of the miserable things going on in the world, and yes, there are a lot of terrible things happening… And we lose hope for the future. We think there is nothing good happening, and all we need to do is curl up and die.
But, being around people who are truly living in some of the most horrendous conditions in the world, and noticing that they were still able to have hope… that really made me come alive. That really made me realize that if they can have hope, I can definitely have some as well.
I understand it can be hard. The world is always pummelling us down. The Earth is being choked with plastic, there are a lot of stupid white men in power, and the economy seems to be dying behind our feet. In all of this, there seems to be only one silver lining, if we choose to see it.
That is the silver lining of hope.
Hope Is the Most Beautiful Emotion Out There
In my humble opinion, it is easy to think negatively about the future. It is the easiest thing in the world to be a critic and a pessimist. That requires nothing out of us. No energy, no enthusiasm, nothing.
What’s hard is to have hope, despite all of the forces on the planet going against you. That’s the hard thing. That’s the thing that I want you to realize. And that’s the thing that I want you to bring more of in your life.
Because without hope, life is so dull and miserable. Without hope, life is just blah. Meh. Nothingness.
There are many people out there, who have made it their life’s business to bring people down, by telling everyone all of the things that are going wrong in this beautiful world of ours. I get it. The world is going to pieces. But I want to spend my time believing in hope, that little fragile silvery emotion that everyone has pushed to the side.
I want to have hope, that the world can still recover.
Without Hope, You Give Up On Making A Difference
I notice that when I don’t have hope, I don’t want to do anything in the world to make any sort of difference. What is the point? It doesn’t really matter anyway. So why bother?
Those are the emotions and words that run through me.
But when I have hope, when I believe in a better future, even if no one else believes it, I do something, anything to change the future. It is easy to give up. It is much harder to stick through to the cold, and miserable end.
I don’t know if anything I am doing is going to make a difference. I don’t know if the world is going to end tomorrow, and all of my efforts will be wasted.
But I do know that I have to try. I have to try because that’s the only thing I, as a fragile human, can do. I have to have hope, and I have to push through. The world needs me. The future needs us.
Hope needs us to come through. Don’t fail her now.
