Comment: What is "Hope?"

A comment I left to a post about Hunter Thomson by my friend, Andy Breslin on his blog, Andy Rants

We need to stop thinking of 'hope' as some sort of bet we're wagering on the future.

A re-reading of Camus would be helpful.

That kind of 'hope' is what you play with while sipping your late night dream potion wondering whether there's anything that can be done and if there is... will it be worthy it?

Didi and Gogo.

I can't go on. I must go on.

Have a carrot

Hope is what happens between two people when they join hands to help a third.

Hope is the unanticipated joy of taking action, of finding a place in the collective human effort to save ourselves...from ourselves.. and maybe in the process, make life a little better, increase the balance in favor of happiness over misery and suffering.

Those who kill hope are always the ones who are driven in their anxiety and fear of death by their need to control... everthing: not only the present, but the future-- enemies of whatever is spontaneous, inexplicably joyfull, or forces them to confront a reality they have not already tamed in their atrophied imaginations.

Hope is not and never was something waiting for us in the future--which never comes, being always... the future. It is what happens when we discover together that such freedom as is possible is always now, in what we are doing and creating in the present; hope is the realization that what we are doing is never finished, that we can never quite anticipate where it will lead, and that in this open-ended, uncontrollable unfolding is everything we can... yes... hope-- to experience of freedom and happiness.