All-Bestowed and Hope.

I’m under house arrest, so is most of the world and her husband.

Home bound thanks to Tauk… whatever cyclone and lockdown; I’ve run out coffee and conversation.  And Tomichen kindles Hope like a beacon. This reminds me of that old children’s story where the girl Pandora (who by the way is first designer human woman, sorry Karan Johar your Juhi is a much copied concept. She was created by Hephaestus on the order of Zeus each of the Greek Gods bestowed her with a skill so Pandora actually means all-bestowed) opens the box that God gave her all the evils of the world fly out except  Hope who stays at the bottom. Now I often wondered why anyone put hope in a box full of evil. The answer to that to me was probably Hope was evil too; it was probably the worst one because with it came so much of pain and malice attached to it, that it could not drag itself out.

Over the years I have begun to wonder if Pandora’s Box was not something we all owned, full of labels, words unfelt, or unsaid, passions half-baked and somewhere along the way these make us hate ourselves. Sometimes I wonder if Pandora was just a little curious girl as she opened the box she let out or squandered her blessings that left her bewildered until hope came along.

Often I see people; I’m on that journey too, tending to adopt mastery goals. The tasks we choose are not often challenges or opportunities to grow, when we fail we quit, or we pass the buck.  We tend to act helpless and experience a general lack of control over our environment. We don’t believe in our capacity to obtain the kind of future we want. We have no hope.

Of late I have begun to get this potential epiphany that the monsters need to come out so that something hidden right at the bottom of the box will emerge….yes Hope and with hope comes faith. Maybe the courage to release the monsters and evils is what gives us the ability to Hope.

Hope somehow has got a weak inflection to it; I mean it conjures up images of blissfully naive chumps pushing up against a wall with a big smile. Well, that’s rather unfair. Considering without hope there is no inspiration for action… when there is no action then there is no result. That makes hope a very powerful force. Maybe not actually magic but hope for most holds a light within that works exactly like magic.

I like what Tom Bodett had to say, a person needs just three tings to be truly happy in this world, someone to love, something to do and something to hope for. In the time of fear and destruction, awakening will take over us, it’s time to let hope in and feel its light, observe it and embrace it. As long as we stay hopeful, and our hope for a better future outweighs our limiting excuses nothing can hold us back.

“Hope.

It’s like a drop of honey, a field of tulips blooming in the springtime. It’s a fresh rain, a whispered promise, a cloudless sky, the perfect punctuation mark at the end of a sentence. And it’s the only thing in the world keeping me afloat.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

written for Indispire #375