The Rope With Two Ends: The Journey of Hope and Despair

There is a particular kind of tiredness that does not come from work.

It comes from hoping. You wake up and the day arrives carrying its small promises, this will be the message, this will be the turn, this will finally be the thing. And by evening the promise has changed shape, or dissolved, and you lie down emptied out. Not defeated exactly. Just thinned. And the worst part is that tomorrow you will do it again. The hope will return on schedule, fresh and convincing, as if it had never lied to you before.

I used to think hope was the good half and despair the bad half. That the work of a spiritual life was to collect more of the first and refuse the second. It took me a long time, and a teaching from a lineage older than my opinions, to understand that they are not two things. They are one rope. And you cannot hold one end without already holding the other.

The mill

Watch the mind for a single day and you will see it.

Hope rises, despair follows.

New hope, new despair.

The mill turns and turns and your whole life passes through the grinding of it. You are not unusual in this. The entire world is on the same wheel, every ambitious person, every person in love, every person waiting for news. We mistake the spinning for being alive. We call the rope our heartbeat.

Even at the end, the old teachers say, a person dies hoping to live. That is how deep it runs. Hope does not exhaust itself. Despair does not finish its work. They simply trade places, forever, like night and day, like the tide that goes out only so it can come back and take the shore again.

I find this less frightening than clarifying. Because once you see that hope and despair are bound together, you stop trying to win the game by hoping harder. You start asking a different question. Not how do I get more hope. But where is my hope pointed.

The thing about the world

Here is what the teaching named that I had felt for years without language for it.

The reason worldly hope always curdles into despair is that the world it depends on will not hold still. You hope for a thing, and by the time the thing arrives, it has changed, or you have, and the hope no longer fits.

You wanted the relationship and got it and it was not the relationship you wanted.

You wanted the recognition and received it and it tasted like nothing.

The world keeps changing its costume, and your hope keeps reaching for the costume it wore yesterday.

This is why the old scriptures called this kind of hope an unholy thing. Not because wanting is sinful. Because this particular wanting keeps you chained.

It wounds you, then nurses you back to just enough strength to be wounded again. It is the cruelty of a thing that will not let you die and will not let you heal.

I have sat across from many people in the worst seasons of their lives. And the pattern underneath almost all of it is this. They are not suffering because they stopped hoping. They are suffering because they never stopped, and the object of the hope was never going to stay still long enough to be held.

Hope that does not turn

So is the answer to kill hope. To go cold, want nothing, call it detachment.

No. That is just despair wearing a saffron robe. I have met those people too, the ones who have armored themselves against disappointment by refusing to want anything, and there is nothing free about them. They have not transcended the rope. They have just let go of the hope end and gripped the despair end with both hands and called it peace.

The teaching points at something far more difficult and far more alive. Keep the hope. Turn it.

The sadhak, the one actually walking the path, is not a person without hope. She is a person whose hope no longer depends on anything that can change.

Her hope is aimed inward, at the unchanging thing, at God, at the Self, at whatever name you give to the one ground that does not rearrange itself every time you reach for it. And because the aim does not move, the hope does not curdle. There is nothing for it to curdle into.

You can hope toward the eternal without ever tasting despair, because the eternal will not betray you by becoming something else while your back is turned.

This is the line that stopped me cold. There is nothing wrong with hope, if it is not tied to despair. And the only way to untie it from despair is to stop pointing it at a world that cannot keep its promises, and point it at the one thing that can.

What I am still learning

I will not pretend I live on the far side of this. My mind still rides the mill most days.

I still wake up hoping at the world, still go to bed thinned out, still mistake the spinning for life. The difference now is small but it is not nothing. I can feel the rope in my hands. I know which end I am holding. And on the better days I can feel where the hope wants to point if I would only let it turn inward, away from the news and the message and the turn that never comes, toward something that was never going anywhere.

The devotees in the old stories were not spared difficulty.

Mira was poisoned. Kabir was poor. Tukaram was mocked.

They were tried as hard as anyone has ever been tried. What they refused was not the difficulty. It was the despair. They kept the torch of hope lit through all of it, because their hope was not borrowed from the world and so the world could not take it back.

That is the whole instruction, as far as I can tell.

Not to stop hoping. To stop hoping at things that move.

I think about the people I read for, carrying the same wound into a new year, hoping at a future shaped exactly like the past. And I think the kindest thing the old teaching offers is not a way to make the future cooperate. It is permission to take your hope down off the world, where it has been quietly killing you, and hang it somewhere it can finally rest.

The rope has two ends. But only if you keep holding it horizontally, stretched between wanting and losing. Turn it upright, point it at the unchanging, and it stops being a rope at all.

It becomes a line you can climb.