HOPE AND FEARS..
"Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself." - Benjamin Disraeli
Since childhood, we've all read and heard our share of stories regarding the struggle of mankind, their highs and lows. We've our religious texts filled with such beautiful & encouraging stories. Perhaps, that is one of the reasons they're referred to repeatedly, especially during testing times. Humanity is a fascinating aspect of life - we can/'t be motivated & discouraged fairly easily. It is in such a situation in which a person questions, his/her fighting spirit & something else is lost besides the obvious.
We require little to almost no stimulus to react. The struggle to survive is the biggest one. A person in today's era thrives to survive the day. The sun sets to rise tomorrow- but what happens in between is what is never emphasized upon! Similarly one struggles to balance one's life while facing the world. Every new day brings its share of excitement and a new challenge. There comes a time in life where the person finally gives in to the pressure of the world crashing on it's shoulders.
To put on a fire we need oxygen, which is obligatory for survival of humans. Isn't that a tad too ironical? Hope is a funny thing, give a person the delusion of hope & watch him dance! S/he'll burn in passion to attain it, at least try to. Men can go to any extent to achieve things that hope bears with it. It is said that any living entity moves against a gradient- towards the pole that benefits the organism. We do what we can with what we have- in the time that we have. In Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead", the aspect of the consequences of shattering ones reasoning skills are discussed at length. Without any order there's chaos & there cannot be order without proper reasoning in a society. With every minute passing, time takes its toll over the persons psyche. Of all the living organisms, human beings are obliged to don different faces in order to survive in the world. Even the shores get vanished with every coming ebb. Hope serves as a pseudo-alternative to aim, it shows what the person wishes to achieve. It fills the spirit with a fire that brings warmth to the body, encourages soul to put in 'that' extra ounce of energy into achieving the goal that hope 'shows' us.
A candle in the wind cannot fight the gust of wind alone, it needs support just as we do during testing times. And at the end of the day, the spirit that one possessed - subsides. No two war's can be the same. We fear what we do not know & we hope that one day our fear goes away. In an already intermingled world, one of the threads that coincide are those of Hope & Fear. There is a part of us that assumes the worst, probably, that leads to the birth of hope. Not ready to accept the 'worst', we like to think that, "No, what if this were to happen instead." Such 'what if's' serve as messengers to Hope. Balance of probability, when fails us, we like to overpower the balance. Someone correctly said, "Sometime's the way to the top is to grease the pole behind you." Who doesn't want to reach the top, eh? But once at the top, the way ahead is down, usually!
A child has a fear of monsters & other supernatural beings but is full of hope that it's parent's are well enough to protect him/her. As the child grows, the fear changes its course and migrates towards the mortal end of the spectrum, making it afraid of men himself. The color of the lens decides how one sees the world. There dwells an unsure allocation in the mind of the person that dictates the mortality of one's abilities, probably that is how fear enters into one's mind. If we are the captain of our soul then it is us that are responsible for our fears too. Cross a black lane by yourself and describe your thought process to yourself in third person! The eerie-ness, the 'unknown' is what crosses our minds- even for a split second. Fear is usually of the unknown- that we had never encountered, but there is also a flip side to fear. KNOWING- we know that if we burn ourselves it will pain and lead to our own demise, this is the fear! Of course, the fear of pain is greater than the pain itself. But dare I say, fear is also a state of mind. One cannot help but acknowledge the circle of hope and fear. Any one of them brings along with it the other, with a resounding sense of the fragility of our minds. We spend a huge chunk of our energy in anticipating a distant consequence. What we forget is, today is a result of yesterday and that one day, tomorrow will be today. We somehow stretch that future and churn it into today and cry over it- spoiling both: today and tomorrow! Here, it is our choice to be in apathy.
One of the results of Hope or Fear is the aqua tears, that flow down one's cheeks. It is a reflection of the extent to which an intuition of a fore-saken tragedy, that might have been. Agree or disagree, don't deny that there came a point in life (several, actually) when the chips were down & the mind asked to give up (Fear) but it's counterpart opposed and made way for Hope. So as a whole, we can be consensual about one thing, that the power of Hope & Fears can not be undermined - for they are the pillars of my own writings!
I conclude this post with a personal favorite quote, one that served as a catalyst and inspired for me to write.
"Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul and sings a tune without words, and, never stops at all." - Emily Dickinson
