Here's hoping

Hope is a wonderful thing and yet in a way it has its own misleading deceit. When the future looks empty and bleak we can temporarily hide that gloom with our hope for better things which may in our minds eye shine a lovely ray of hope on such a gloomy picture. In a way then hope can make something that is ugly appear temporarily beautiful. If we consider it in this way then we could extend that thought into believing that hope is nothing more than an illusion. Nietzsche, one of my favorite philosophers, once said that "Hope is the worst of evils because it prolongs our torment!" Imagine that if a million people will hope for something good how many of those hopes are ever answered? If I hope for a nice sunny day tomorrow it is not too much to hope for and my hope may be granted quite easily. If I hope to win the state lottery then out of one hundred million other hopefuls that also share this hope, one of two may just be lucky! If I am poor and live in a poor country then I can hope for a better life in another nation. If my first attempt meets in failure then I can hope my next attempt will meet with greater success. This demonstrates the renewable illusion that old hopes may die but can be instantly replaced by new ones.

It seems we are forever hopeful and that our day-dreams are filled with delicious dreams no matter what kind of life reality has given us. But no matter how unrealistic our hopes are they do fuel our ambitions and drive us forever forward. We instinctively know we all the positively within us that it is better to hope than to despair.

Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world and no country is immune from the sad and ever increasing suicide rate and when we try to ascertain the reason why some people, especially young people feel compelled to commit suicide when to the outside world it appears that they had everything to live for. Perhaps there are many reasons why they do such as depression and other mood disorders and it also appears that in at least one area of their lives they saw no solution, no way out from their predicament and they simply lost hope and with that gone the will to carry on.

I can admit that there have been occasions lasting for long cold lonely hours when I too have felt the loss of hope and everything worthwhile. It is indeed a dreadful feeling and a grim and awful place to be in and the seemingly obvious solution to end this situation is to end life itself. This is so wrong to the rational mind and yet so easy this dire solution comes to those gripped in the depths of despair where rational thoughts have long deserted them.
With my new treatment I have been given hope and all the results are extremely positive and show that I actually have a future now. My hope although sometimes lost is back with me again and the pleasure is sharing with most others the ignorance of our last heartbeat. With this in mind and looking back over recent months then it makes some of the decisions and choices that I've made seem rather bad yet having the vantage point of living in both the gloom and the sunlight I can at least understand what drove me into making those choices and what has driven others to make worse choices that I have made.
"Shall I commit suicide" was a philosophical question once posed by Albert Camus who went on to say in a much better way than I say it, that if the answer is "no" then there are things still to hope for. Is it so strange then that if we consider that when things are bad we take comfort in the thought that they could always be worse and when they are we find hope in the thought that when things are so bad they can only get better.
It appears that where there is life there is hope!

Hitomi and I went to visit Masato's photographic studios to have some Halloween photos made that we will make into cards that we share with our friends at our Halloween party on Saturday at the Mars. Here you can see one of each of us and the header is of us both riding broomsticks. I need a familiar!

"Heh heh heh, double, double toil and trouble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble."

 

Happy Halloween everyone.

Dum spiro, spero

While I breathe, I hope