I would say that for all people it is difficult to go on living, unless they have hope. Hope is the anticipation that things are going to get better. It is an active emotional orientation geared towards the future. It assumes that things are not the way one wants them to be now and it usually means that one is going to do what he can to set the occasion to improve a situation. One is going to work very hard to change things, or one is going to pray very hard that a situation will change by itself, or, finally, one is going to wish very hard that a situation will change. In all these stances that a person can take, the key is that a person is taking a proactive mental position moving towards the future, but still grounded to some extent, in the reality of the present. When a person totally disconnects from the grounding in the present, we say that a person is simply dreaming, living in fantasy. But hope is grounded in the present and in external world reality.
There are two mental attitudes that are competing with hope for people’s attentions today. These two attitudes are forms of grounding in external world reality. One is the Eastern religion notion of mindfulness. Mindfulness is the ability to be totally present in the moment with one’s awareness, and the result is one stands apart from a situation and doesn’t over react to it or become overwhelmed by it. It’s a way of gaining a kind of control over one’s thoughts, sensations and emotions so that they don’t throw him off balance.
The other mental attitude that has become very popular today is the notion of gratitude in twelve-step programs. Focusing on all the good things in our lives, however small and seemingly unimportant, rather than focusing on what we don’t have. Supposedly the first kind of focusing brings out positive healthy feelings, while the second kind of focusing brings out negative unhealthy feelings. People in program make lists every day of all the little things they are grateful for. And there are people who develop mindfulness exercises, standing apart from their lives and focusing on that which gives them gratitude. For example, an American author named Sam Harris writes of people imagining they have lost everything and then mentally restoring what they have lost for a renewed appreciation of all that they may have taken for granted.
Mindfulness and gratitude, on the surface at least, seem to be very reasonable concepts. But both of them have built in limitations. Both of them deal with the defined discrete point of the present. Focus on the present, they say, which is what one has and what one can control. The flowing blendable continuum of time moving out to the future is too vague and blurry for a many people focused on mindfulness and gratitude. Too risky and anxiety-producing, too full of the potential for a lot of disappointment. But it is taking risks that gives us the opportunity to fulfill our hopes. If we expend an inordinate amount of energy focusing on the present either through mindfulness or gratitude or a combination of both, we have that much less energy for focusing on the future. Planning out what it is we want for the future, passionately hoping that things are going to work out in the future the way that we want them to.
Yes, to focus on the uncertainty of the future, on the risks involved in our activities to achieve what we want in the future, can be uncomfortable and even painful. But without this kind of focus, the pathway to achieving our goals becomes much more difficult and problematic. Taking risks to fulfill our goals definitely means leaving our comfort zone.
On the other hand, spending so much time, energy, and state of mind on mindfulness and gratitude means to be afraid to take our foot off the base, to use a baseball metaphor. With mindfulness, we passively stand apart from and observe our activities without passing judgement. With gratitude we passively appreciate all the good little things in our lives. In both these cases, there is a certain fatalism here. Live in and with what one has rather than more actively try to seek out what one doesn’t have but wants.
Hope allows us the emotional energy to sustain plans to achieve or obtain something beyond that which one has done or had. Rather than focus on all the organic imprints being made on us by our surroundings, it allows us to focus on the organic imprints that we want to make ourselves in order to feel alive and prepare for death. Imprints that can give our lives a sense of vibrancy and that can be preserved to form a strong surrogate immortality. There is no question that sustained hope in the face of adversity can lead to discomfort, even pain and suffering sometimes. But the rewards for a successful outcome from the hope can be well worth the negative experiences.
By the way, there is one other complex behavioral entity that is completely focused on the present, on the matter at hand, simply because it lacks a broader organic consciousness. I’m talking about a robot.