Hope: The Hidden Treasure in Everyday Life

The Buddhist hopes for enlightenment; the Christian hopes for salvation; the Hindu hopes in karma. The list goes on, but the theme is the same: people hope. Hope can also be viewed from many different perspectives, such as the psychological, theological, medical, and the personal. Hope can also be as simple as a child hoping for a special doll at Christmas, or it can be more complicated as hoping in the face of a terminal illness. Some view hope as a negative and claim that hope is responsible for a great deal of suffering in the world. The argument is that hope leads us to grasp at phantoms which may be more associated with attachment to things. Others view hope more positively, and describe hope as believing in the possibility of a positive result in the face of despair. Their hope is similar to the placebo effect and is sometimes responsible in the cure of physical disease. Countless stories of patients with life-threatening diseases miraculously recover in the face of hope. Human hoping spans the scope from superficiality to the profundity of human existence. We hope because we are human, but what we hope for is what can cause great despair or save us from our potentially painful human existence.