The Journey – Despair

In a previous post I wrote about the hope I cling to; but hope makes for an uncomfortable companion as, too often, lurking in the shadows cast by hope lies despair. I dream big dreams, I have a big passion and in pursuit of all of that I cling desperately to a big hope; but in that big hope I find big despair.

How can two things so far removed from each other, so seemingly mutually exclusive, appear to co-exist with such compatibility? Hope and despair are polar opposites, and yet one so often precedes the other, and at times they cohabit the same spirit, the same emotional space. In my experience it is despair that supplants hope; this may be through impatience, it may be through immaturity, or maybe it’s because hope is too fragile to withstand the voracious appetite of despair to consume all before it.

It always strikes me as odd that hope is so fragile. After all, without hope we have no future and without a future we lose a, even the, point to our existence. Maybe we have become so desensitised to the mediocre and the mundane – to merely existing where we were made to live – that we no longer hold to hope; in those in whom there is no hope there can be no despair. Hope and despair are like good and evil, or winning and losing – one cannot exist without the other.

Maybe as a species we have won our battle with despair by killing ourselves – our essence – by removing our hope of life in order to choke despair?

Despair is a sniper, lying hidden, stalking its prey until that fatal shot is can be taken. Despair approaches through stealth, and only when the trigger is pulled does it reveal itself; and as the bullet rips through the air towards its target there is a brief moment of awareness that despair is coming before it strikes, but in that awareness there is usually helplessness.

After the initial impact there seems to be recovery – a normalisation where the shock subsides and equilibrium is restored. But In reality despair, through its bullet, has caused a wound that becomes a cancer, eating us alive from the inside out. Its symptoms are often hidden, but its manifestation is destructive in the extreme; the damage it leaves behind can be irreparable.

Perhaps the biggest problem with despair is that we come to own it: it becomes an integral part of who we are and we speak of it as if it is a friend, almost lovingly. It’s not that we love to feel the way despair makes us feel, rather we forget that there is another way to feel; and so we have to love despair, otherwise we have nothing to cling to, nothing within which to frame our reality. The more comfortable we become in our relationship with despair, the less we fight against it and the more we embrace it; and with each embrace, with each caress, we die a little more as the cancer slowly, silently, invisibly consumes us.

It is unrealistic to believe that we can travel through life without encountering despair, but when we arrive in that place we must be sure we are merely sojourners, temporarily cohabiting the same space. We must recognise despair for what it is. We should not despise it for without the pain it brings we can never fully experience the wonder of hope; but we must never grow to welcome it, to long for it or even to accept it. Despair is an inevitable and necessary part of our journey, but we must be sure to cling to something greater, something deeper, something more transcendent, and yet infinitely more fragile than despair can ever be: hope.

Without experiencing the sting of defeat, the taste of victory is less sweet; without suffering rejection, acceptance can never be celebrated. Until we experience the bad things we will never fully appreciate the good things. And so it is with despair. And yet, that which comes to rob us, to silently suffocate our very essence, to make us dead to ourselves, is, ironically, the very thing that ensures that we can appreciate the glory of hope and live a life filled with expectancy and wonder in pursuit of the things of which we dare only to dream.

I accept despair because I must, but I hold onto hope because I can.