I learned a long time ago that hope is a four letter word.
This insight became second nature to me long before I studied Buddhism, a tradition that (generally) puts hope in the category of dukkha, which is often translated as suffering, but that’s wrong. Dukkha is is the attachment we have to things and ideas which is what leads to suffering. In fact, dukkha is the essence of the first Noble Truth of Buddhism. It’s pretty heavy stuff.
Hope is something we create out of an attachment to an outcome: hope that things will get better, that a situation will not be painful, that people we love will love us, that we will not die or live in pain.
If there is one thing a chronic illness will teach you, it is to abandon hope, or go crazy. I think hope drove my mother to near-insanity at times, in the cycles of her bi-polar disorder. Her hope that this time will be the last time always infected both her manic cycles and her deep depressions. Maybe it kept her alive, too, but it was a high price, because constantly hoping for a better life kept her from living the life she had.
Hope has not made me magically thin or pretty. Hope will never make me prosperous. Hope did not save my parents’ lives, or my marriage. Every time I start hoping for something, the pain of not getting it is an exquisite reminder of how fleeting such promises are.
The other side of abandoning hope is not nihilism, or fatalism, or complete detachment. That, I think, is even a harder lesson to learn than abandoning hope.
Because it’s relatively easy to stop caring, to become jaded or addicted or mean. People do it every day. We have a whole self-help industry centered around teaching people to feel again. Most don’t want to — hope was cruel to them, they fear that word and the after affects. None of this is about hope, though.
Abandon hope. Embrace vulnerability.
Let go of expectations and just connect with other people when possible. Let some people go. Let expectations go. Do the thing. Do ALL the things.
Which is not to say, “don’t make goals” or “don’t strive to be better.” Dukkha is not suffering, remember. We experience dukkha as it stems from our attachment to our perceptions — body, mind, family, job, home — because we will always be unsatisfied with them until we learn how to embrace our vulnerabilities without weighing them down with hope.
DISCLAIMER: I mean, I’m not a Buddhist scholar here, I’m no one’s roshi. These are my thoughts about the teachings and how I, an atheist skeptic, have interacted with them throughout my life. If you want a good, modern Buddhist primer I highly suggest Chogyam Trungpa’s Shambala: Sacred Path of the Warrior.