Hope.

I've come to realize that maintaining hope sometimes requires an end in sight. Hope sometimes stands on its own too. It sort of depends what one is hoping for, and how much control one has over a particular situation.

I live in hope living with someone who has a chronic disease. We hope everyday will be a bit better and this or that new medicine will help improve or at least maintain a certain "quality of life." This kind of hope takes a certain amount of faith. Faith in oneself, faith in one another, faith in medicine, faith in courage. This kind of hope can be a life-long endeavor and part of it is in accepting and then inventing better days, because we have to.

I also live in hope where we have some control. This kind of hope can be remarkable. We just need to make choices and do better, or work harder, or be more prepared and my experience is that things do get better.

But then there are the kind of situations that come up in life where hope becomes difficult, because one can't see an end. I don't see an end right now. I know time will take care of the passage of the difficulty, but it doesn't repair the experience. I can see the ending, but not an end to the here and now loss of art and ease. Will this patch-work last until the end of this experience or will it finally get better? I don't know.

I can only hope.