Hoping against hope...

I read about this study once that was performed on mice. The researchers put two mice in a tank full of water and waited to see how long they would swim before they died. It turned out it was 3 hours. (I know this is horrible, but just bear with me.) So the next stage of the experiment was to put another two mice in the tank, let them swim around an hour or two and then put a ramp in for them to crawl up on and rest. The next day they put those same two mice in the water tank and waited to see how long they swam before they died. This time the mice swam for something like 8 hours or more.

The point of the experiment was to prove the motivational power of hope. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing. I've always felt that this is what keeps people in abusive relationships. Even if their partner is only good to them 1% of the time, it is just enough to sustain the hope that keeps them from leaving. Yesterday, I was reading the narrative of Frederick Douglass with a student, and he spoke of how he lived off of his hope, even as he witnessed other slaves being murdered by their owners, he still had hope that one day he'd be free.

I write about hope because today in my never-ending novel (I'm finally on CD 19 out of 20, thank goodness), one of the main character's students wrote in a paper that life is nothing but crap and hope. Just people constantly swimming around in a water tank. Of course, I definitely don't subscribe to this view, but it got me thinking about the importance of hope and the sheer presence of it in almost every tiny facet of our lives. Then I realized how it is an underlying theme in just about every story I've ever read. We're always hoping for the best. The funny thing is we don't even know what the best is. But we still keep on hoping.

Hope can either incite you to create your own fate, as it did for Douglass, or it can doom you before you even begin. If you hope against hope for one specific thing to happen, and it doesn't, that which does happen is automatically labeled as "bad", whether it is or not. Maybe hope is a cosmic double-edged sword. Maybe it pushes us toward fulfillment, maybe it drains us of our perspective. Either way it is definitely a big part of the human experience.


This elderly woman sits outside of an old church all day begging for money. Hope.