Hope...

“Hope is a good thing..
…maybe the best of things…
…and no good thing ever dies”
This is what Andy Dufresne wrote in a letter to “Red” in “The Shawshank Redemption” with the “hope” that his friend would one day come and read this.
So why am I rambling about hope now? Because I feel sometimes we forget to “hope”, sometimes we just feel like giving in, sometimes we just don’t think its possible to continue anymore, sometimes we feel that we have lost.
Hope is what makes us go on, makes us give another try, makes us feel like we are going to be successful this time. It’s the only driving force which helps a person continue in a path where everything seems to be coming in the opposite direction. Its difficult to start in a direction if one doesn’t hope that she will reach the destination. Every act of life is done with a “hope”.
Yet people abandon hope in situations when its most needed. They think that hope is a dangerous thing, it can drive a man insane because it brings more failures, more pain, more sufferings. When Thomas Edison was questioned after his innumerable successive failures in building a light bulb, he replied “We now know a thousand ways not to build a light bulb”. Had he discontinued after a moment we would have lived in the dark age for a while longer because eventually somebody IS going to invent the bulb, someone who hoped and believed she can make the bulb. The sweetness of success is directly proportional to the number of failures (remember the numerous failed attempts of solving a physics numerical and then finally being able to solve it? And then feeling like you were a Newton yourself?) and that pleasure of achieving it makes the whole effort worthwhile. I believe that if we achieve things very easily we don’t value it also, the mere fact that I had to toil a lot to achieve it makes it dear to me. However just hoping isn’t always enough, it needs to be backed by an honest effort to reach your goal.
The hopes and dreams of an individual is what defines her. Nobody can touch your hope, its inside you and drives you to your destination.