There comes a point in every person’s life where, suddenly and without warning, you can’t breathe. Everything in life begins to come together in a whirlwind that can minimally be described as hectic, and then it hits you with the force of a hurricane. Experiences, deadlines and the schedules that encompass your life often seem to overwhelm you, and there seems to be no way out of this tunnel of stress. But there is.
I know, perhaps more than most, that the devolution into a depressive fit is not a fun experience, but sometimes it is a necessary one. For the past months I have personally felt a shadow-some cloud of darkness-gathering just outside my consciousness, and such a feeling seemed to cast a pall over all that I did. This was, to say the least, not a pleasant time.
When the feelings of depression, or worse, hopelessness, begin to encroach upon your normal rational thinking, it is up to you to counter those feelings. Certainly I was having some good times-it was, after all, summertime in the city; but the feeling of hopelessness is like rain on limestone and can ever so slowly erode the happier emotions. It is a poison, true, but this poison has an antidote.
The cure for the disease of college-level hopelessness, for me at least, is to stop being hopeless. It sounds simple, because it is simple. Honestly, how silly to think that there is nothing in this life for which one should be living. How stupid to think that there is nothing in the future for which one should hope. There is always something to live and hope for, and anyone who tells you to the contrary is lying.
There is a Bible verse, Hebrews 11, verse 1, which states, “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see.” I know what the verse is saying; it is saying that we need to have faith that our hopes, our dreams and desires, are not merely pipe dreams that will lead us down a path of negative-Nancyness and despair. We must be sure that what we hope for is not just an unfounded hope, built upon the clouds, but a hope upon which, by having faith, we can put our foundation.
We live in a world of hopelessness, and that wears on everyone. The weariness of the world may not be immediately evident to the naked eye, but just under the surface of the news, in between the lines of the magazines, a subtext of despair can be seen. Katrina demonstrated the world’s hopelessness and the American ability-which is not entirely unique-to tolerate hopelessness and despair as a fact of life. Losing hope is not a fact of life; it is a fact of death.
If a person loses the ability to hope, that person has lost the ability to live. Life is a series of different hopes and dreams, if we don’t have faith in our hopes, and if we don’t believe that hope is more than just pointless grasping at a future never to be had, then what then is left for us? Death. God put us on this planet not simply to die and rejoin him in Heaven, but to live our lives and to have faith that when we get to Heaven, yes, after we die, it will be all we had hoped for.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons I will never understand suicide bombers. The idea is not that God placed humans on the planet merely to die. He did not create the world and all that resides within its confines simply to watch it destroy itself. How absurd would God have to be to accomplish such a feat? If God were truly like a petulant little 3 year old who destroys his block structure just to see what destruction is like, he would not have graced us with the capacity to have hope.
So long as we, as human beings and as students, maintain hope, we can rise out of the despair that seems to be closing in around us. We all have an incredible capacity for doing evil things, ’tis true; however, we also have an equal, if not more incredible capacity for doing good. That is not a hope-it is a fact.
A recent book chronicles Mother Theresa’s struggle with feelings of hopelessness and lack of faith, and so what? Mother Theresa was a human, just like the rest of us, but the difference was that she showcased the human capacity to do good. This does not mean that she was not capable of bad things, merely that she chose not to do them. She was a woman of great courage and hope. Not hope that things would get better in her lifetime, but hope and faith that, one day, people around the world would shrug off this shroud of hopelessness.
Shrugging off such a shroud seems difficult, it truly does, but it is not impossible. Every day you must look at the world as a child does. A child sees the world through the eyes of endless possibility, and those eyes do not register hopelessness. The eyes of a child see the good in the world, not the bad, and would much rather believe-through ignorance-that nothing bad lurks in the shadowy world.
As adults, we know that the world can be a terrifying place, but that doesn’t mean that there is any lack of good within its bounds. Children see the good, and we must do the same. Just as hope struggles against hopelessness, so too does the good in the world struggle against the bad. The good is struggling to be seen, and it is up to us to see it for all it is worth.
Enjoy the fall, walk through a field and revel in the freedom, smell a flower, take your time, relax, close your daily calendar, put away the schoolbooks and take a moment to just be yourself. Look toward the future, but not with the mindset of what you have to do. Look with a child’s eyes and see that the future, far from hopeless and terrifying, is filled with excitement and wonder. Who could hope for anything more?
Andrew C. Emmerich is a senior in the College of Education and Public Service.
