Saturday, March 16, 2013

Dara's Life Lesson #1: Try To Have Hope, Even In Your Most Darkest Days




"To live without Hope is to Cease to live." ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

Believe it or not, there are many people who say having hope is a weakness; that it is an illusion that plays with our hearts and minds. Even many wise philosophers say that hope is nothing but a crutch to the weak-minded (ex: Aristotle,Robert Green Ingersoll, Friedrich Nietzsche, etc.) Not to say that  I am even close to being as wise and knowledgeable as those famous men, but I believe living in that frame of mind they are wrong in this area. I have read and personally heard a many amazing true stories of people who were able to escape many horrific obstacles and one of their basic principles that they said helped was having hope above all. 


Of course, those people who overcame their dark difficulties didn't entirely depend on hope; rather, it was a seed for that to gave birth to a strong and courageous spirit. In some sense those wise philosophers were right; having hope is just not enough. But, it can be the kindle that starts the fire. When we learn to have hope in ourselves and even in others, the walls of our many imprisonments burn down. 


We will have many bad times in our lives. Just remember the reason we have them is not so we can be driven down but to rise gloriously like a phoenix in it's ashes. I truly believe that the universe sends us these trials for us to learn and become stronger from them. I can remember most of my dark times from my childhood; and now that I look back I know that they were there for me to learn to become a better person. And I am not going to lie; one of the main reasons I was able to survive such trialing times was being able to have hope along the way. The hope that I could live a better life full of happiness and love.


They say it is darkest before the dawn. Just because we fail and fall doesn't mean that everything we do is hopeless. It just either means that we need to try harder or that we simply are choosing the wrong path for ourselves. These mountains we must climb exist to challenge us; to become stronger, wiser, and overall better people. However, it's up to us to choose to have hope in our hearts, to learn from these lessons, and be able to grow from them. 


I like to think of it like a football game. We lose some and we win some. However, the players will never be able to show their true strength and abilities if there was no opposing team to challenge them. Or sometimes I think of life challenges like a famous fairy tale. There would be no hero if there was no monster to slay.


So even when we have our dark days, have hope in yourself, and belief that everything will turn out for the better. You'll be surprised by the results once you start seeing your life this way. You may even begin to notice conquering your past battles by believing in the idea of hope. As the great Martin Luther King Jr. said, "We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope".