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I'm in something of a fey, metaphysical mood. And hope is important to me at the minute. Always, really. One of the cornerstones of my life, of necessity as much as anything else. But ... I've never been sure exactly what it is.
I should explain that I am ... not a very emotionally educated person. Perhaps one of the reasons I empathise with Alfred so is because I understand intimately the british preoccupation with hiding or disguising emotions to a socially acceptable form. In fact ... I could probably be safely called 'repressed', if I didn't find that too depressing a thought. The first time I ever got publically angry, for example, my sister turned to me in absolute shock, and promptly told me that "You're not allowed to be angry, because you're the calm one!". *sighs* I've yet to learn different, unfortunately.
Ahem. However. There was a reason for the family history bit. It's just that ... because of my family's approach to emotion, I've developed a ...well, I suppose it's a weird way of looking at it. In that emotions, to me, are physical sensations. Or at least, I usually do not notice them in myself until they manifest as physical sensations.
Examples would be ... well, strong sad, melancholy or touched emotions, usually brought on in sympathy with another's pain, will seem to me as an ache in the hands. Fear is a weight in the belly. Happiness is a rising lightness in the chest. Pensieve is a kind of floating weight, centered in my head. Love ... is usually a warm, expanding weight in my chest. And hope ... hope is a reaching heaviness, around my heart.
That ... rather lacks something as a working definition, yes? Hope is a sensation of weight, reaching upwards and outwards from my heart. Hope ... is the thing that tugs me forward, heavy and unyielding, through life. Hope ... is bright and hard and almost painful, a firm line around my heart whose other end is attached to some distant prise I can't yet see or imagine. Hope is a promise without words, without definition ... without fulfillment? Because it doesn't stop, you know. I keep living in hope, and I can only do that because the hope is never fulfilled, so it never ends.
But ... depressing as that sounds (and sometimes is), it's also strangely comforting. Because it means that, no matter what else happens, no matter how deep the despair, how bad the situation ... I will always have that hope, that reaching heaviness. Maybe that's why, no matter how far I've fallen, I've never tried to stop. Because I've never been without that reaching. I've never been without that tug on my heart, pulling me forward.
So ... maybe that's what hope is. A wish that doesn't need fulfilling, whose only purpose is to exist, to pull us forward into life, to tug us onwards towards the next unseen, unimagined wonder. A promise undefined, because how can you define the future?
Hope is life. And here, I assure you, I am speaking wholly from experience.
I should explain that I am ... not a very emotionally educated person. Perhaps one of the reasons I empathise with Alfred so is because I understand intimately the british preoccupation with hiding or disguising emotions to a socially acceptable form. In fact ... I could probably be safely called 'repressed', if I didn't find that too depressing a thought. The first time I ever got publically angry, for example, my sister turned to me in absolute shock, and promptly told me that "You're not allowed to be angry, because you're the calm one!". *sighs* I've yet to learn different, unfortunately.
Ahem. However. There was a reason for the family history bit. It's just that ... because of my family's approach to emotion, I've developed a ...well, I suppose it's a weird way of looking at it. In that emotions, to me, are physical sensations. Or at least, I usually do not notice them in myself until they manifest as physical sensations.
Examples would be ... well, strong sad, melancholy or touched emotions, usually brought on in sympathy with another's pain, will seem to me as an ache in the hands. Fear is a weight in the belly. Happiness is a rising lightness in the chest. Pensieve is a kind of floating weight, centered in my head. Love ... is usually a warm, expanding weight in my chest. And hope ... hope is a reaching heaviness, around my heart.
That ... rather lacks something as a working definition, yes? Hope is a sensation of weight, reaching upwards and outwards from my heart. Hope ... is the thing that tugs me forward, heavy and unyielding, through life. Hope ... is bright and hard and almost painful, a firm line around my heart whose other end is attached to some distant prise I can't yet see or imagine. Hope is a promise without words, without definition ... without fulfillment? Because it doesn't stop, you know. I keep living in hope, and I can only do that because the hope is never fulfilled, so it never ends.
But ... depressing as that sounds (and sometimes is), it's also strangely comforting. Because it means that, no matter what else happens, no matter how deep the despair, how bad the situation ... I will always have that hope, that reaching heaviness. Maybe that's why, no matter how far I've fallen, I've never tried to stop. Because I've never been without that reaching. I've never been without that tug on my heart, pulling me forward.
So ... maybe that's what hope is. A wish that doesn't need fulfilling, whose only purpose is to exist, to pull us forward into life, to tug us onwards towards the next unseen, unimagined wonder. A promise undefined, because how can you define the future?
Hope is life. And here, I assure you, I am speaking wholly from experience.
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