Naïveté and cynicism: the tension between hopefulness and hopelessness

27 Jun

Holding hope is an essential part of human survival and evolution. To believe in a better tomorrow (depending on how today might be panning out) and to persevere in the face of adversity or what might feel like relentless misfortune is a tremendous ability. Hope is like a flame that can burn brightly or dimly. We are able to fan that flame when we connect with the idea that the future is open – knowing that things can change (sometimes suddenly from one moment to the next) and when we allow ourselves to see the positive potentials that lie within a difficult situation. However, hope can become distorted if it is clouded by our defences. Sometimes we rigidly cling to infantile fantasies of the world being how we wish it would be. Hope then loses it’s flexibility and is trapped in a perfect, unreal picture.

Other times we are so crestfallen, despondent or angry with how things have turned out, that we start to fear being hopeful because it’s too painful to open ourselves back up to possible wounding again. Then it’s strangely easier to believe that there is no point in trying, that people are definitely going to fail us and we may as well stay closed. Many people move between these two extremes, as the more idealistic the hopes we have, the less likely they are to materialise and therefore we are vulnerable to repeated disappointments and frustrations. Then we live in a world of doubt about whether there is anything we can do to move forward and we grieve the loss of our dreams. This is not to say that our wishes cannot ever come true – they are just rarely exactly how we imagined them to be. Hoping for the best while preparing for the worst is a truly complicated line to tread.

Ideas for engaging with this particular tension:

BODY: where do you feel hope in your body? In a serene moment, give yourself permission to stop and slow your body down. Gather up your attention and pour it into connecting with a time that you felt hopeful. Really start to notice what happens in your body when you do this. What is the quality of this feeling? Does it give you a sense of lightness or warmth or the sensation of something growing or glowing? Sit with it for a while and let it magnify and brew. Follow the unfolding of the feeling. It may be quite emotional. Stay curious. Now recall a time when it felt as though all hope was lost. Is this located in another part of your body or does it create an overall sense of something, such as heaviness or dulling? Gently switch between the two feelings, almost as though you were introducing them to each other. Let them speak to one another as they both hold important pieces of information that can make a whole.

MIND: reflect on the patterning of hopefulness and hopelessness over the course of your life. For some of us, we started with a great deal of hope and this may have been partly related to a type of naïveté that we held about the nature of the world and other people. We may have needed to stay wedded to the notion of a ‘just world’ while we were small and very much at the mercy of it. Life experiences may have then taught us that it’s not safe to trust everyone (for some of us, that may have happened at a very young age indeed) and that there may be many barriers to achieving our aspirations. This could have been exacerbated by the degree to which we are naturally (and were trained to be) a suspicious or trusting person. Write some thoughts down about any wrestles you have with these ideas and perhaps start to imagine that beyond naïveté and cynicism, there is the possibility of developing true wisdom.

SPIRIT: the highs and lows of flipping in and out of super-hopeful and super-hopeless can be deeply unsettling to the soul. This may or may not be how you typically navigate through life but it’s likely that there have been times when you have felt like this. Sometimes it can help to create a mantra or find a saying that can act as a soothing balm for the drama that this type of dynamic can bring. I like this quote by Alice M. Swaim: “Courage is not the towering oak that sees storms come and go; it is the fragile blossom that opens in the snow”. For me, it encourages a quieter pathway through the noise. Hopefulness doesn’t always need to be loud and hopelessness doesn’t always need to be mighty. It takes a huge amount of courage to sit with either and we can make space for them both to land softly in our hearts. Maybe try to find something that resonates with you and helps you to manage the intensity of the flame.