Hope is a Fuel

The concept of hope, like the stylized heart symbol, crops up so often in Hallmark cards, inspirational posters, and mealy-mouthed platitudes that for a long time, I got really sick of it.  This stemmed in part from the frequency with which I'd seen people act like simply hoping was enough - as if resolve, determination, planning, and working your butt off are just sort of incidental.  Combined with a long streak of things seldom going well, and I'd pretty firmly adopted the opinion that hope is a load of bunk.

That's not to say I went swimming in the Slough of Despond of anything.  Well, I did, sort of, but that was mostly unrelated.  Oh no, I stuck to bitter pragmatism; get a goal in mind and work on it, and either you'll succeed or you won't.  Hope is for pansies!  The nice thing about being a fatalist, I told people, is that not only do you avoid disappointment, you even get a pleasant surprise now and then.

"Yeah," my girlfriend told me, "but it's a lot glummer along the way."



To which I probably offered some acerbic quip, because for a while apparently I aspired to be some kind of archetypal Bitter Smart-Mouth.   Of course, a few years later, I'd kind of like to pinch past-me's cheeks and tell him what a cute widdle gwumpy-paaaaaants he was.   One of the few things more amazing than having some portions of your life vastly improve is having had a large, direct role in their doing so.

In discovering this, I discovered, too, that hope isn't pointless after all.  That revelation sort of snuck up and whacked me up the back of the head sometime last week.  All the platitudes are still bunk, of course, but the phenomenon itself has a purpose, and, so far as I can tell, it is this:

Hope is a fuel.  If you have it, you can keep it around, and maybe make some sparks with it, and if nothing else assure yourself you do, in fact, have fuel.  However, where it really comes in handy is if you have some structured, purposeful thing to do with it - a goal, a plan, a one-step-then-the-next slugging-away-at-it - whatever.  You need to do something with it, and moreover, you need to do something specific with it.  Otherwise it's just like setting a can of gasoline on fire.  It'll go boom, but boom accomplishes precisely jack-all.

Conversely, if you have the vehicle - the goal, the plan, the putting one foot in front of the other until you're done, the whatever it happens to be - but  no fuel, you can keep going.  It's just a huge pain in the butt.  It's like pushing a car in neutral.  Your back hurts and you get rocks in your shoes and blisters on your hand and twist your ankle and you've never been so worn out in your life and no matter what, the weather sucks.  Seriously, there is no such thing as good weather for this kinda thing.

So, yeah, you can keep going but the likelihood of getting too freaking tired to do so increases exponentially. If you do, it's not a sign that you're weak or flawed.  If you don't...holy crap, kudos to you.  If you insist on toiling on without fuel when fuel is available, you're kiiiind of a silly ass.

No, hope alone is not enough, any more than a can of gasoline will get you from Austin to Portland.   The journey will go faster and easier, though, if you have it, and make use of it.  If you absolutely insist, and promise to otherwise proceed in a sensible manner, you're even allowed a few booms along the way.