Hopes at dusk

Roaming at dusk, in the fragrant meadow of the twilight, we speak of our hopes. Five years ago they were fanciful, Disneyland hopes that we would utter bombastically into the darkness, feeding off each other, trying to outdo each other with how outrageous we could be. Squealing and shrieking with laughter we would discuss the gorgeous men we would marry, our dream careers that would both make us a lot of money and allow us to save the world, and the amazing philanthropic projects that we would initiate together. We were sure that we would be able to accomplish all of these things and more if only we worked hard. We were blissfully unaware of the traces of self-love that tainted the hopes we expressed. We were dimly aware that many individuals that had achieved the hopes that we desired were miserable, but yet we still dared to hope them. We never looked beyond the horizon of our hopes to the steps that we would take to realize them, and as such our hopes quickly became dreams and floated away into the darkness.

It is now five years later and we stroll together in the same rich inky twilight, but we have suffered and our hopes are more tentative. We are calmer, stiller, and entering the fall of our lives. We no longer demand that our hopes be granted and feel resentful when they aren’t. In fact we have chosen to give up many of our own hopes in order to contribute to something larger than ourselves. We had wept in each other’s arms in those painful moments when our inner eyes perceived with clarity the ephemeral nature of the hopes that we had devoted so much of our mental energy and time to, and the degree to which these false hopes had swindled our hearts. Once we were too exhausted to cry any longer, we would look outside at the many shades of green in the meadow in a way that we hadn’t been able to see them before, but then we would start to weep again.

We even went through a period when we had scarcely deigned to hope, scarcely dared to utter a word or take a step because our hearts had proved false to us before. We didn’t feel that we deserved to hope. Sometimes this inability to hope led us down a dark road of despair.

Today we are ready to hope again, but we do it more respectfully, alert to the possibility that we don’t know how to proceed; we have hopes, but we have caveats. Yet we have conviction that we will be guided by One infinitely wiser than ourselves, if we take steps to realize our hopes. We try to keep our hopes within a clear framework, instead of flying around in a fairyland, with no border or direction. While our hopes in the past were very concrete and measurable, our hopes today are more vague, although we are trying to give them a flesh and body, to share them in such a way that fills the hearts of others with hope. At the same time the more we work, we realize our hopes are limitless and they rise like the sounds of the crickets as the night begins.