Sunday, February 26, 2017

Slave to Hope

I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day. This person, who I will call X, was contemplating the worth of living and whether or not committing suicide would be better. X said that death would be freedom from the bondage of life. That embracing death as a friend is the result of a sudden clarity of thought.
I replied that it was not freedom, but slavery, to feel that death is the only way to happiness and peace. It's not freedom to believe that you can only be at peace by killing yourself.
X proceeded to tell me I was a slave to hope. That slavery is only a term used to denote something humanity deems inappropriate. That just because something makes you feel good doesn't mean it doesn't have mastery over you. That slavery is slavery, whether it's to something generally deemed good or to something generally deemed bad.
At the time, I was distraught and only replied that if that were so, I would rather be a slave to hope than death. Which is true.
However, it was a thought provoking moment. I started to wonder whether one really could be a slave to hope. And I've decided that you can't.
To back up a bit for perspective, all things that are good are hard. Everything of worth is hard to attain. Everything that is desirable takes effort. It is easy to settle for less and sin. It is easy to be apathetic and full of vice. It is far too easy to give into temptation. But it is hard to be a person of virtue. It takes a lifetime of repetitive struggling in what seems to be a futile fight against temptation to become a saint. It often seems like a one-step-forward-two-steps-back situation. Nobody ever said it would be easy to be good.
Hope is a virtue. Hope is inherently good. And yet hope is one of the hardest virtues, at least for me, but I think for most. It is hard to hope. Can you be a slave to something that requires a dirty struggle every time you reach for it?
I'd argue no.
Most mental slaveries you hear about are only slaveries because of how easy it is to get caught. Porn, drugs, self-harm, lust, despair, they're all far too easy to give in to. It is so easy to get caught in one of these traps, because it feels good, it's simple and straightforward, and takes almost no effort. You rarely have to exert personal emotional effort to get addicted. You only need personal emotional effort to get out of one of these addictions. They are easy to get into and hard to get out of. But hope is hard to get into and easy to get out of. Hope takes the hard work first, with no promise of a return of happy feelings.
Now, I suppose you can be a slave to an ideal of hope. The feeling most people equate with hope. But real hope is so hard to come by. I doubt anyone is capable of being a slave to something so hard to fight for.
In fact, if you have progressed so far in you life that you can summon real, raw hope often enough to be "addicted" to it, then I argue that you are, in fact,  the master, not the slave.

Such a Pity

We're all searching for the same thing
Running in circles
Breathing out
Endless questions
Of purpose and pain
We're all searching for something
Such a pity
Such a pity only a few of us
Ever see what it is
We're looking for