87. Hope For The Present

I dream of a future where my life and the world around me will be better than they are now. This dream can be a source of hope, but it can also become a problem. For I will eventually reach a point in my life where it is unlikely that things will get better for me personally. They will instead begin to alternate between staying the same and getting slowly worse. This is not pessimism but the actual reality of aging for every human being.

Seeing this reality approaching, I might feel there is no hope left for me and fall into despair. But like all suffering I face, overcoming despair is a matter of attention and awareness. When I have confined my life to my own personal existence, I am not seeing very far or very clearly.

By opening my attention, I can see the lives of others as deeply connected to my own. These others might be my loved ones, the people in my community, or humanity at large. Rather than existing as an isolated body, I can see that my life is part of a greater living organism. While my individual situation might not improve, I can continue to hope that things will get better on the whole.

There is also another dimension to my despair. I have not only limited my hope to my own life but also to the unknown future. We most often think of hope as future-oriented, but there is no need for it to be. Hope can be something I live out in the present moment, a kind of trust I place in each and every action I take right now.

To hope for the present means I don’t just wish for a better tomorrow — I actively work to create a better today. I look for value and meaning in the world that exists immediately, and not in the world yet to come. I express and share everything I know and see with others today, instead of putting these experiences into storage for some distant day. It is by continually returning to the eternal present that I can always find a lasting and resilient hope to reassure me.