Wednesday, April 22, 2009

I Hope This Finds You Well

A 15 year old girl bellows at her parents: “You don’t know how much I love him! I can’t live without him!” Tears streaming down her reddened face as the moving truck pulls up to the house.

A 90 year old man lies in bed alone for the first time after 70 years of marriage and a wife’s death. He longs to peer upon her countenance and thoughts of joining her fill his dreams.

Love is a uniquely powerful emotion weaving its way through the tapestry of our lives. According to The Beatles it’s all we need and Milton summed it up thusly “So dear I love him that with him, all deaths I could endure. Without him, live no life”.

However I submit that Hope, not Love, is actually the lifeblood that sustains us all. Hope is the real invisible hand; not only behind the little girl’s angst or in the elderly despair, but in absolutely every facet of everyone’s life, in every possibility that lay before us.

Hope is all powerful. It sustains not only the loved, but those searching for love. It sustains people in the direst of times when their very mortality forces them to face death itself, and it also empowers those that are living the dream to push forward for something more.

Hope knots up our stomachs in a job interview, then morphs into elation when we imagine the possible future ahead.

It is in a parent’s eyes clutching a new born as they hope so badly for all life’s greatest gifts to be bestowed upon the unsuspecting infant.

Hope is in everything we do. People are the most despondent when all hope appears gone. However, once acceptance of the new predicament sets in, hope will flicker in the darkness and will refuse to be snuffed out.

It is worth noting that a life in hindsight has an apex, a sort of Benjamin Button trajectory, where life leads up to something wonderful only to slip silently away. We don’t live our lives looking down the slope though. Each new low is a new bottom and we hope to right the ship, catch a favourable wind and turn this swale into a crest.

When Jack Nicholson asked “What if this is good as it gets”, we barely bat an eye, for today is a new day and there is hope of a brighter tomorrow.

I will leave you with two of my favourite quotes from my favourite movie...they articulate the point much better.

Shawshank Redemption

“Remember, Red. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds you well. Your friend, Andy.”

-Red reading Andy’s letter in a Maine hayfield

I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.

-Red deeply breathing in the air through the bus window

Whatever it is that you hope for, I wish you the best. But know that hope in and of itself is going to be there to help you along your journey every step of the way.

See ya next week top of the food chain!

-Life is complicated and far from perfect, but it's still great.

7 comments:

  1. By far your best work. Oftentimes it is better to put the thesaurus down and simply and clearly let commonspeak ring true your words. Outstanding structure, cadence and use of image. Nice job!

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  2. just a glimmer of optimism and the critics are raving! even I feel like a curmudgeon in the wake of all of your gushiness. does this have something to do with Obama?

    nice work bud....King springs eternal.

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  3. Awesome piece, bru. But you already knew I was a big fan. If it weren't for hope right now, I'm not sure where they hell I would be.

    And Uncie Bear nails it again - the people love the positivity! Hopium for everyone!

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  4. WOW. that was a good piece of writing

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  5. This really is an amazing piece of writing. I just have one small critique. Your first quote “So dear I love him that with him, all deaths I could endure. Without him, live no life”, was written by John Milton in Paradise Lost, not Shakespeare.

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