Hope is an illusion, mostly.
It isn’t fabricated, and packaged in neat little bite-sized nibbles, floating around for consumption.
Hey Joe, didn’t you get retrenched last week? Quick, grab that purple one, it’s flying your way, it includes hope for divorce, cancer and job-loss.
Of all the tragedies I witnessed, a colleagues’ loss of a child has been among the worst.
In one such instance, hope was never constructed. Not in the true sense of the word.
The parents floundered, broke, recovered a little at times, and later reached a point where they began building, but only years after the fact.
Hope is not a given.
That realization, that acknowledgement that hope might remain absent can actually be the incongruity that does help you move on: If there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, then at least you understand you are still alive, inside the tunnel, and the damn thing hasn’t collapsed yet.
And maybe that’s where hope starts, as a stock-take in the void.
When disaster hits, hope is hammered together from fragments of reality despite the wreckage.
It shows itself in pauses, in the breath survivors take when they glimpse a path out.
Hope doesn’t hang on boardroom walls or smile from Ikea frames, it’s the scream you choke down when the world’s boot is on your throat.
Hope is born when people spit blood, stand up, and say: not yet. No. We’re not done.
Are you done yet?
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Hope isn’t a gift-wrapped promise waiting in the sky; it’s a scar stitched together in the dark, a stubborn breath that says not yet when everything else collapses. It doesn’t arrive on cue, and sometimes it never does—but even that absence forces you to take stock, to see that you’re still alive in the tunnel, still standing. Hope is less a light at the end than the defiance to keep walking when there is none.