Last update: May 17, 2015
Pablo Neruda asked himself “Do those who always hope or who never hoped for anything suffer more?”. Hope is intimately linked to the senses and is the human capacity to gather all our strengths and concentrate them in order to achieve a goal. The word hope derives from the Sanskrit root spa-, which means “to strive towards a goal”. And this is exactly what it means to hope: reaching out for something we cannot yet see, but which helps us move forward.
Hope has to do with positive emotions. When we hope for something, we feel good, full and motivated. Our gaze changes, and so does our emotional state. We feel enthusiastic and full of energy. It is a feeling that makes us powerful.
From an early age we use hope to build our life plans, to outline our dreams and set our goals. We live thanks to it, because it is the force that pushes us towards our goals. Hope is our travel companion. Together with it we think about where we would like to go, what we would like to become or who we would like to have by our side. Hope helps us turn our dreams into reality.
Let's renew hope
Hope is needed to not give up, to fill us with life and push us to achieve our long-term goals. As the years go by, we have the feeling that our store of hope is slowly running out. This feeling is related to experience: things don't thrill us now as they did when we did them for the first time, because we have years of adventures behind us. For this we must renew our hopes.
The problem with hope is that it comes only when we are not satisfied, when we build our goals on expectations on which our happiness or self-esteem directly depends. And we know that if we don't reach them, we won't be comfortable with ourselves. For this we must continue to hope and feel motivated, without having to take our feet off the ground.
Hope awakens the most positive feelings of the human being, and it is contagious. We rely on her to feel better, to achieve what makes us happy. According to neurologists, what some scientists call the "research loop" resides in the brain's hypothalamus. This circuit, which arouses the sensations of pleasure and happiness, is activated only during the research process, and not during the achievement of the goal.
Most of the happiness, therefore, lies in the process of seeking and expecting. According to Gilbert Keith Chesterton, "if there is one thing that makes existence shine, it is the hope of finding something around the corner". Hope makes us happy, which is why we should cultivate it.
