Hope is good, right? Wait a minute, I heard that hope is actually bad. Well, maybe not exactly.


Let’s just say that hope is tricky.


We could imagine that hope occupies a continuum stretching from no hope to high hopes. No hope, the absence of hope, is hopelessness, a state that social scientists have rightly associated with depressed states, even suicide. Surprisingly, some very wise teachers have suggested that we cultivate a mindset of hopelessness. But why?


To understand that as anything but utter madness, consider the other end of the continuum, high hopes. That is, through the ceiling, ultra-optimistic hope. As a temporary or lingering state, that kind of hope feels pretty good, even ecstatic. Such a mindset deserves a deeper look.


Most will admit that high hopes occasionally rendezvous with big realities and that great aspirations might be the very path to realizing those big dreams. It happens. But what about lofty hopes so extreme that our leaps become hard landings, half-steps and stumbles? We land disoriented and empty handed. There is disappointment…and discouragement and depression and giving up. Our hopes and expectations can become, not uplifting, but an anchor taking us down. That is the nature of false hope.


Perhaps, we have this continuum all wrong. The extremes of high hopes and no hope have their moments of course. But a better guide might be to start with honest hope. That kind of aspiration is basic and true. For honest hope we must summon our courage and rationality as well as our fundamental truthfulness as we abandon self-deception. It is unsettling to imagine that this approach messes with the continuum of hope we started off with. After all, the answer to hope may not be quite as easy as to keep it high or keep it low, and then go on auto-pilot.


Instead, hope seems more of a moving a target. We could abandon the delusion that there is some static bulls-eye and all the trembling that goes with the pressure to hit it.


This new conception of hope is as fluid as the blood in our veins. As light as the air we breathe. Our ever-changing life demands that hope be ever-changing too. Mindfully, we could begin to notice that there is a natural, dynamic relationship of hope to circumstance. Ever-changing hope is hard but genuine. As precious ideas about hopes high and low disappear, we might discover, moment to moment, honest hope for ourselves.