"Love You": This is how we live...

"I'll stop the world and melt with you. You've seen the difference and it's getting better all the time. And there's nothing you and I won't do. The future is opened wide.": I am realizing how powerful and essential hope is for living. The opposite of hope is despair, that feeling we have when we lose sight of hope. So much of what I see on social media seems to deal with people's need to find hope, or expressing feelings of despair (and certainly looking for the crowd to offer some sort of reassurance).

Where does despair come from?: Despair is that feeling when one perceives that there is no light, no one, no hope near by. While in despair, fear grips the heart, the mind, the soul.

"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”― Yoda:  Suffering is merely the result of all the fear and anger. These negative emotions shroud us from living. We become encapsulated in feedback loops of darkness layering on top of darkness. It is the hatred that is "the dark side". Hate is the opposite of love. Love is so powerful!

Love is "other". Hatred is "self".

Love is compassion, hatred is hurting. 

So it feels like emotional math. Remove the fear, avoid the development of hatred and suffering.

So President Snow in The Hunger Games film understands. He says,

"Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear."

Hope can be offered by one to another in an act of love: So we need to find our way out of despair when we feel we are in complete darkness. Martin Luther King suggests that we can only see the stars when it is dark, but we need to be able to lift or heads up to see when our emotions press our heads down away from the light.

The Dawn is Coming: We hear that it is always darkest before the dawn, but we need to have faith that dawn will arrive and in the darkness time ceases to move. By understanding the despair, where it comes from, knowing it is bound in the fears of our own mind, we might move beyond it.

“I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.” ― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

"You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it.": Words, identification, communication, people, relationships... hope. And it is the fear of losing our relationships, the people of our stories, the sharing with others, the understanding, the meaning... that controls us so powerfully. So how do we address our fear? We see it for what it is; we reach out to those around us, and we offer love and compassion; we tell them there is light near by even if they cannot see it; we call out; we hold their hand; we place hope in their grasp. Letting go of the fear helps break the cycle, but it goes so completely against what makes us caring and feeling. What a catch-22! 

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." --The Litany Against Fear in Frank Herbert's Dune

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” ― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed:

I am certain the answer to despair is simple when there are others gathered around. When we grieve... when we feel despair... we perceive we are alone. Those with the capacity to reach out have the ability to shed light on that perception. Love and compassion offer hope to those who need it most. This is how we must live!