Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here

This is the inscription over the gate to Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy.  Until recently, I’ve found these words chilling.  After all, it’s a greeting at the entrance to Hell, which is supposed to be a pretty nasty place, and who would want to live, or die, with no hope?

I do.

Hope is described on Wikipedia as “an optimistic attitude of mind based on an expectation of positive outcomes.” As a verb it describes a desire for certain things to happen.  “I hope I get a better job.”  “I hope that in our marriage we both will be happy every day.”  “I hope you recover soon.”

In our dark moments, we might feel that hope is all we have.  Yet I propose that hope, especially when it is unrealistic, prevents us from accepting and enjoying to the fullest the present moment in which we live. It might be pleasant to focus on some desired goal but that emphasis can prevent us from being fully engaged with the reality of our lives right now.

Several days ago I met with Frank, a mediator in a serious dispute.  During a break he told me about a former client of his, I’ll call him John, who was worth five hundred million dollars.

“John wanted to be a billionaire,” Frank said.  “I asked him what he could buy with a billion dollars that he couldn’t buy with five hundred million.”

“Good question,” I said.

“But he just repeated to me, over and over, that he wanted to be a billionaire.  That was his hope.  Two months later John died of a drug overdose.  He was under a lot of stress.”

I guess that John, like most of us, hoped for more in his life than he had and his addiction to hope kept him from feeling fulfilled by the five hundred million dollar moment he’d already achieved.

Years ago, at my thirty-fifth high school reunion, I spent time talking to David.  I remembered him from when we were twelve. We used to eat lunch together every school day in a secret place so the bullies wouldn’t find us.

“What have you done with yourself for the past thirty-five years?” I said.

“I’ve been an engineer for the City of Los Angeles.”

My immediate thought was that David must have lacked the imagination to get promoted and had no hope of becoming a supervisor or earning more money.  I felt disappointed for him.

“And I’ve enjoyed every minute of my career,” he said.

My disappointment turned to jealousy. His answer caused me to question my own career. Though I’d been extremely successful in terms of money and social standing, I was far from feeling that that I had enjoyed every minute. Not even close.  My hope had prevented me from focusing on each moment and savoring it.  While I was gazing at the far horizon my ship had crashed into many log jams and had been, at times, a rough journey.

Each of us enters into a marriage filled with expectation and desire. We think back on our wedding day as one of the happiest of our lives.  Yet, how easy it is to let our hopes prevent today, this moment, from being our happiest.

Call me wise, call me a fool, or call me just plain tired, but more and more I’ve abandoned hope. I’ve stopped expecting something to be better than the way it is today.  When my mother died, I was in the room, holding her hand.  She had been in a coma for five months, with no possibility to recover.  I did not feel a loss.  I felt at peace.

Now I attempt to embrace the moment rather than looking ahead to some rosy future, and I find that living with appreciation for the present, rather than hope for the future, brings me much closer to Heaven than to Dante’s Hell.

Alan