December 31, 2021

The Hope Eternal

 Our species is a strange one. It likes to believe that all will be well in the long run. As the sun flies through the universe with its tiny little blue planet, the even tinier us like to believe that we are invincible, that we are not a happenstance but part of a larger design and a larger plan.

 

Even our most outrageous stories which dare to explore the concept of chaos, end up bringing the world to an order. Look at our popular culture icons over the last couple of decades. For every Joker, we find our batman, every time an Evil-Lyn embraces chaos and wants to let it loose, a Teela rises up to being order. Even our games call chaos Magic and asks mages and witchers to control them.

 

In our worldview order is good. Order gets things done. Ordre is the natural form of life and hence when cataclysmic events completely turn our worlds upside down, we get afraid of Armageddon. The Hindu pantheon calls upon Vishnu to preserve after Shiva’s Tandava destroys everything.

 

If you have managed to read through some of the older posts, you might see that the questions that troubled Siddhartha troubles me as well. He however became The Buddha and I just read about his journey and his teachings. The three biggest sources of suffering illness, old age, death starts taking new meaning in a world that we live in today. With everything up in the air, mortality has come closer to home. Age crept up while we masked up and illnesses became many with treatments becoming more and more expensive.

 

2020 was the year of survival. 2021 was the year of reassessment. How 2022 will turn out is anyone’s guess but as we have seen over and over again throughout our history, hope is eternal.

 

And as Bollywood puts it beautifully, “If the ending is not happy, it just means the film is not over yet.”

 

So there it is – another year goes by and when we look back fondly many years from now, we will remember how we survived on hope and prayers.

 

Because all will be well in the end.