HOPE:Journal #5

Journal #5

(From a journal I kept: July, 1993)

Hope and despair, yuumei, deviant art

    Our hope has deep roots that go far into our pre-reflective consciousness. Hope does not depend on Meaning in Life, without hope, we simply give up and die.
the conditions we live in or even on the prospects for change or improvement. Sometimes people continue to hope even when there is precious little else to give any satisfaction in their life, when they are living in squalor and when the prospects for the satisfaction of even basic needs are remote. Yet they continue to get up each day and go about their labours. Sometimes their lives are reduced to repeating basic routines of survival, almost automatically. And they do it. It would seem that, at this point, there is nothing else to sustain them but a kind of automatic hope that is implicit in their survival rituals. I am not arguing that this is any kind of ideal or model hope. I am only saying that, when all else is stripped away, we can see how deeply hope is rooted in us and how it forms a kind of underpinning for everything else that makes up a full and complete life.  Victor Frankl was  a prisoner in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. He survived; many did not. In Meaning in Life, He observes that without hope, people simply give up and die.
    Hope is obviously very closely linked to the instinct for survival, the life principle From an educational point of view, touching the hope and the dreams of people is a powerful motivational force. Advertisers know this well and as educators we need to remember.