Day 25: Opposites

Thinking these salad thoughts is not always fun and not always easy, but I think they’re worth thinking so I let myself think them.  There are certainly far more hazardous things to think on, that’s for sure.

When I think about big things, I try to follow Queen Brené’s formula:  name it, stay curious, keep showing up.

Naming it sounds like it should be easy, but with big things like this, it’s not.  At least not for me.  One of the things that helps me name it is to think about what it’s not.  I’m much better at that, and there is some value to the process of elimination.  It’s an odd way to go about things, but it does sort of help to define it.

After I’ve percolated on it for a bit and am ready to talk about it with my people (which can take a very long time), I sometimes run things by them to get out of my own head.  You can imagine the joy and lightness I brought to the Thanksgiving table when I asked my people, “What is the opposite of hope?”.

It’s very fun inside my head.

I have thought a lot about this, though – the opposite of hope.  An obvious first response is hopelessness, but that didn’t feel right.  It felt too dismal somehow.  The sad of hopeless feels more severe than the thrill of hope; they don’t equal out in my head.  They don’t balance.

I’ve gotten a wide range of answers from other people:  despair, discouragement, pessimism, doubt, fear, effort.  My first answer was dread, but dread seems more certain than hope does.  Hope allows for the possibility of good, but dread seems to entail a fairly certain bad.  Maybe that Biblical hope that has more certainty is more like a positive dread. 

I like the idea of effort as hope’s antithesis.  The thought behind that one was that hope is just wishing for something better, but effort is doing what you can to actually make something better.  Hope is passive; effort is active.  That felt okay to me.

I finally settled on worry as the opposite of hope because if hope is looking to the future with expectations of good things, then worry is looking to the future with expectations of bad things.  That clicked into place for me because I am a natural worrier. It comes to me easily for reasons I understand better now but still struggle with on a way too regular basis. 

Holding worry next to hope makes it pretty clear why I think hope is stupid.  It fits into my deeply engrained patterns of scarcity and fear and insecurity.  My gut wonders who in their right mind would ever cling to a potential positive when there are so very many ways that things could go wrong? 

But then maybe I have to consider “what is a right mind?”, and that’s a whole ‘nother salad thought.