Have you ever heard the story of Pandora’s box? Let me sum it up for you.
Pandora was used by Zeus to take vengeance of Prometheus who stole fire from heaven. She was given a beautiful jar as a wedding gift but was instructed to not open it under any circumstance.
She was however curious enough to disobey and opened the jar, letting escape all evil contained therein, and letting it spread over the earth. By the time she closed the “box”, only one thing was unable to escape in time: Hope.
But here is a good question related to Pandora’s box but concerning our own world, our own reality: What if, after reopening the box, Hope was not there?
It can be answered in two ways. The first answer would be Hope escaped without being noticed, leading people to think that it was still in the box while the second answer would be Hope never existed to begin with.
Let’s first take a look at the first answer.
We often use the word hope. “I hope you’re feeling better“, “Keep hope“, “Don’t give me that kind of hope“. Those are examples among many other sentences where the word hope is used in our everyday lives. Does it mean that Hope truly escaped Pandora’s box and spread over our world along with all the evil? Not necessarily.
A logical explanation would be that we created hope to give us the strength that we lack.
But if we are the ones who created hope, the first answer cannot be valid. And that leads us to our second answer: Hope never existed to begin with.
Hope is only an illusion. But we believe so strongly in it that it created its own existence in our lives.
But even if hope was real, what good would it bring to us? Hope may give us the strength that we lack, but that strength is immaterial and uncertain. You can basically hope anything you want but it doesn’t mean that it will happen. So why do we keep hoping if nothing is going to happen anyway? could be one of the questions you would ask yourself. But a better way to formulate the question would be When do we start hoping?
We start hoping when we feel powerless. What is funny about mankind is that once people feel powerless and nothing in the physical world can help them, they don’t give up and instead start seeking for power in the immaterial world. How funny it is when someone, who only wants to believe in something if they see it with their own eyes, suddenly starts believing in something they would never consider as being real until they become powerless. Hope is one of those things. But the fact is: Humans are not strong. And because humans are not strong, they need to rely on something to make them strong. Hope, as I mentioned before, gives us an immaterial and uncertain strength. What I meant about that is that we rely on hope to do something for us, we think that hope is strong enough to influence the physical world. If I said that hope gives us an uncertain strength, that is because we have no guaranty that relying on hope can change anything.