Thoughts on Hope

I was struck by a passage in a novel by Dave Eggers called What is the What.  The main character in the book Valentino Achak Deng, a “Lost Boy” living in refuge in the United States after experiencing unthinkable hardship during the Sudanese Civil War, is telling of losing an important person in his life on his way from war plagued south Sudan to Ethiopia.  Recalling his pain after losing the one person that supported him the most, Deng(What is the What is a fictional autobiography based very closely on the life of Deng) says:

I was so tired at that moment, so bone tired that I felt that I could fall asleep as he did, sleep until my body went cold.  But then I thought of my mother and my father, my brothers and sisters, and found myself invoking [his] own mythic visions of Ethiopia.  The world was terrible but perhaps I would see them again.  It was enough to bring me to my feet again.  I stood and chose to continue walking, to walk until I could not walk(Eggers 218).  

As soon as these words crossed my eyes, I thought of another book I’d read about how man experiences the worst of human evil called Man’s Search for Meaning.  In his psychological portrait of an average prisoner of war, Dr. Viktor E. Frankl describes what happens as a result of the loss of hope when enduring struggle and suffering: 

The death rate in the week between Christmas, 1944, and New Year’s, 1945, increased in camp beyond all previous experience. In his opinion, the explanation for this increase did not lie in the harder working conditions or the deterioration of our food supplies or a change of wealth or new epidemics. It was simply that the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naive hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on their powers of resistance and a great number of them died(Frankl 76).

These two books, describing different versions of the same story of the human potential for both absolute evil and goodness, capture the crucial nature hope plays when overcoming all manner of adversity.  For they show that hope, though not some sort of magical shield, is an essential ingredients for moving forward in life.  Both groups, the people of Sudan during the later part of the 20th century and those that endured Holocaust, lived through pure evil.  However, Eggers and Dr. Frankl show that those that are willing to keep moving forward with life have a greater chance to fight off all of the forces that stack against them.

My life has known no evil or suffering of the magnitude that these writers describe.  Yet, I am growing more aware of the magnitude of human failures such as injustice, inequality, racism, greed, disease, war and hatred plentiful on every corner of the Earth.  Even my own life, though comfortable by any reasonable measure, is full of challenges and obstacles every step of the way.  So it is with hope that I choose to face each misfortunate or difficulty.  Hope that life will improve, problems will be solved and that people will be good to each other.

I feel compelled to end this post with one more quote from Dr. Frankl that has become a credence in my own life; reminding me on a daily basis that I have the power to choose hope and goodness:  

We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way(Frankl 65-66).