Hope is such a powerful thing. In the midst of every loss, every failure, every mistake, and in the face of every single thing, be it necessity or desire, which seems may never come to pass, hope keeps us pushing towards the day when those things will become a reality; striving ever onward no matter how many times we may fall or find ourselves back where we started, having to fight so hard all over again for the things that were obtained and then taken away by some tragedy, mistake in our own judgment, or sometimes for what seems like no reason at all but bad luck, which is a tragedy in and of itself. Hope gives purpose. It gives meaning. It gives life. But, such a sorrowful thing hope can be at times when one can only watch the world slip away into the nothingness it is coming to lust for more than life, itself.

So many people hope for things, but seem to forget or loath the work and effort it takes to achieve and maintain such. Granted, there are those who do remember and strive to achieve and maintain what they hope for legitimately, but the percentage of such people is becoming smaller as time passes, and this ever declining percentage find themselves fighting so much harder, and having to hold to hope so much more fiercely, because of the ever increasing percentage of those who want to take the easy way out, casting most of the weight of the work and effort onto those who are still willing to put it forth, and abandoning whatever it may be when the effort required becomes more than they, themselves, are willing to put forth for whatever reason, and all while placing the blame on those who are actually trying. This is a great reason that the declining percentage continue to decline, because the harder it is to achieve what one hopes for, the harder it is to hold on to hope. The harder it is to hold on to hope, the easier it is to give up.

Those in the declining percentage who are still willing to fight and keep a death grip on hope are often the ones who suffer the most, for they are the ones who are tortured and tormented by emotion and conscience, sometimes wanting to give up and to do things less than decent and respectful as so many more people are doing every day. This is where I find myself.

A hard battle it is indeed to hold on to being a genuinely good, decent, and respectful person and having to struggle so hard when I see the deceitful (and by deceitful, I mean lying, cheating, stealing, manipulation, treachery…basically anything that compromises the trust, respect, and honor towards one or more people and/or themselves) gaining and flourishing, pretending sincerity and disguising their intent until they get what they want.

The way I see it from my experiences, there are two sides to feeling this way. The first is the anger and frustration spawned by seeing people who are being deceitful more quickly and easily obtaining the things we are both needing and/or hoping for and legitimately struggling for. While we struggle so hard to see our hopes become reality…often with minimal results, or results that are ever so slow in coming…the only effort they put forth is deceit, and are rewarded with what seems like immediate results, in other words. With this comes anxiety, depression, and a harder struggle for hope with every instance. These feelings are intensified the longer the wait on anything we are hoping and striving for may be.

The second, which often isn’t a comforting thing at all, but often does help us to hold on to hope in its own way, is seeing the things people have obtained in such deceitful ways only last them for but a season, even if they want it for much longer, for deceit, in the vast majority of cases, always comes to light at some point in time, whether it be soon after or years down the road. Sometimes, it is for one of the same reasons the declining percentage struggle so hard…seemingly for no reason at all but what appears to be bad luck (but what I like to call karma in the cases of deceitful people). Regardless, the people who put forth more effort into being deceitful to obtain what is desired or hoped for often do not put the same effort into legitimately keeping it, but only in continuing to be deceitful to hold on to it as long as they can or want to, and to keep their deceit from coming to light for as long as possible. We often forget this factor of loss when we are standing on the side of anger and frustration, thinking only of how unfair it is that someone so easily obtains that which we have been struggling so hard for and have not yet seen come to pass. This applies to all areas of life.

So many people say how they want and expect and deserve to be treated, yet are not willing to do the same for others, especially when it comes to obtaining something they hope for or desire. They completely disregard how badly they will hurt someone by being deceitful as long as they get what they want, and always seem to have an excuse or a blame to place on anyone but themselves so as not to have to account for their deceit, and are often times the most defensive about being done the same way by others, even if they are only being done so in a minute way.  Most of these are doing so with all knowledge that they are just trying not to have to account for their wrongdoings just so they do not seem to be the one at fault, either so they can simply get away with it or so they can get away with it long enough to move on and do the same to other people when their previous attempts begin to fail them. Sometimes they even do all they possibly can to slander the person they were wronging and create lies that take the focus off themselves and place it upon the person they cannot deceive any longer, doing all they can to make the victim’s life a living hell so as to see them suffer for having tried to call them out on their deceit, while at the same time moving on unnoticed to the next deceitful opportunity.

The only thing worse than this are the ones who are doing this very thing and are convinced that they are doing no wrong. They have lied for so long to get their own way without having to put forth the effort that they begin to believe that they aren’t doing anything wrong, and that their victims are trying to make them look bad. In far too many cases of such, they try to find every flaw and imperfection in their victim and their victim’s life so as to dress it up with drama and lies and use it against them because they think they are getting revenge for being wronged. Sometimes it doesn’t even take a history of lies and deceit to bring someone to self-deception such as this. Sometimes it is merely their true nature, and they are doing all they can do to convince themselves otherwise. Whatever the reason self-deceit comes into play in these cases, it is still the worst form of deceit, because not only are they harming others to wrongly obtain whatever it is they seek, but they have deceived themselves into thinking they are doing no wrong by it, and will most likely continue to do so to others. Most times the victims have already endured extreme amounts of sorrow, pain, and loss before the self-deceived deceivers learn from their mistakes. Sadly, some never learn, losing everything and continuing to cling to the belief that they were the ones wronged by those which they were wronging. This also applies to all areas of life.

There are also people who hope for things, but have such limited standards or preferences that they feel the thing they are hoping for should be absolutely perfect as is…at least what their own personal idea of perfection is. They say they want something, but only if it comes a certain way, in a certain package, and doesn’t take any effort or acceptable compromise on their part to have to work with for it to be something that can truly make them happy. These people continually pass things over that could make them far happier than they would have ever imagined, merely because it doesn’t seem to be everything they wanted it to be according to such deceptively high standards. Either that, or they find something that seems to be everything that they wanted, or so close to it as to seem to be something they can be happy with, but then reject it and walk away after a period of time because it wasn’t all it seemed to be because of the work or acceptable compromise that may have been involved for it to be the thing that would truly make them happy. They then begin the process all over again, never finding what it is that truly makes them happy. They don’t want to compromise, but expect everyone else who may be involved to compromise for them, in other words, not realizing that some compromises can be good things, and that nothing is ever as perfect as someone wants it to be, because sometimes it is the imperfections that make everything truly perfect. Far too often, this also hurts others who are not deceitful and who are genuinely good people, and who are striving to hold on to hope, because the declining percentage who have any kind of stake in what is being discarded by those who cannot be satisfied are knocked back a step, and have to try harder yet again and struggle that much harder to hold on to the hope that things will work out some day. This also makes it harder for the declining percentage to trust people.

Basically, what it all boils down to is that the vast majority of people seem to want things the “easy way”. They use whatever form of deception or self-deception is necessary as long as they get what they want when they want it, which more often than not is something they only want temporarily or end up only wanting temporarily, anyway, as opposed to long term, because of either only wanting instant gratification of some kind or not wanting to make an effort to keep it, casting it away as soon as they have it or are no longer satisfied with it. They want what they want only for the feeling it gives them, in other words, and not for the appreciation and respect for what they want before and after they have it, expecting others to put forth the effort that they, themselves, refuse to put into anything but the deception of their choice.

The only comforting thing about this is that sometimes, these deceivers are so used to deceiving to obtain what they hope for that they do not see when their deceptions begin to fail them, and continue to try to twist and conform their deceptions towards those they are trying to deceive, only further outing themselves, while trying to place the blame and guilt the person they are deceiving into thinking they, themselves, may actually be the cause of the problem, prolonging their deceptions long enough to cause more damage to their victims until in either rage, sorrow, or a combination of the two, the deceived reach their limits and halt the deception, but by this time, any trust, respect, friendship and/or love that may have been between the two is either almost completely lost or lost completely. But, in cases like this, this does make it harder for the deceivers to continue to deceive, for usually, enough people are aware of the deception that the deceivers cannot deceive so easily, and have to try and find new people to deceive to make any ill progress.

There remains another percentage amongst these fractional factions that plays an unknowing hand not only in the declining percentages struggle for hope, but in their own as well, feeding not only the beast of hopelessness seeking to devour those who would rage against it, but also aiding the increasing percentage in their deceptions. This percentage wants something so badly, often times after trying and failing due to the deception of others or by legitimate failure, they begin to fall for deceptions more easily because they are so desperate to have whatever it may be that they fall for the beauty of the deception over the truth of it all, or they see a small bit of what they hope for or desire in someone or something else, and decide for some reason that it is what they want or need before finding out anything more than just that part of it all, and then are so let down or blameful for being let down again, that they throw away any efforts or progress made towards happiness, often hurting and further complicating the struggle for hope in the declining percentage of genuinely good people when those people happen to be the object of what they thought they wanted due to only focusing on the part that appealed to them.

These are but a few examples as to why hope is such a sorrowful thing, because it is one of the hardest things to hold on to in this world with so many factors coming against it from every angle, and sometimes from so many angles at once. But, it is the very existence of every negative thing that makes hope so hard that defines why hope is such a necessary thing, and why we fight with all of our heart and sanity to hold on to it, even when we believe nothing good will ever come to pass because of how many things have gone wrong or hurt us or set us back to square one time and time and time again. If we gave up hope, how would we ever expect anything to ever get better, and which one of the reasons, listed here or omitted because there are just too **** many to list them all, would we become in the destruction of someone else’s hope, or the destruction of our own? Without hope, and everything we fought like hell through to hold on to it, how would any of us truly appreciate the day when it finally comes, or every day thereafter?

In everything we see and experience, there seems to be so many more things that would have us let go of hope and sink to the bottom, drowning in sorrow until dreams are so lost in the fathomless depths that they will never wash ashore to see the light of day to breathe again. But in reality, and in our heart of hearts, it is our very dreams that outweigh what would strip them away, and there are so many more reasons to hold on to hope than we will ever think about at any one moment, especially in the worst of times, because the bad is sometimes so bad that it is all that we can focus upon, and we lose sight of most or all of the reasons we fought so hard and hoped so fiercely at all. But, it is the existence of every bad thing that should convince us every single time one or more befall us that we should never give up hope, for it is the rise and swell that we feel when things go well before every fall that reminds us of the feeling and the dreams that fuel the fires of our hope, and help us to believe that every hell will be worth heaven when it comes. It is only when we find ourselves swimming in sorrow when what we thought was everything we had been hoping for turns out to be another deception or another mistake that we start to give up on hope because of feeling like hope was wasted, and the more times we have to experience the fall, the harder it is to hope once again. What we often fail to realize is this…if it hurts so bad to fall into the letdown of finding out that what seemed to finally come was not what we were hoping for, then how much to the exact opposite will the joy be when what we were hoping for finally comes to be? If we never go through the sorrow of falling, how would we ever learn that sometimes what we were hoping for so long may not have been the right thing until something comes along to give us something new to hope for? One day, one of the instances we find that what comes along that makes us feel that our hopes and dreams are coming true will actually be what we were hoping for, and sometimes, what comes along will be so much more than we ever dared to dream to hope for. If we give up any single time we find what comes to be wrong, no matter how right it seemed or felt, then how will we ever find either?

Sometimes holding on means letting go, for if we are hoping for the wrong things, then holding on to the hope for those things will only bring us more sorrow if we do find what we hope for in those aspects. Sometimes letting go means holding on, for if we let go of hope when we let go of the wrong thing, how will we ever find something better to hope for? To dream is to hope. To hope is to dream. Nothing good is ever easy. Nothing easy is ever good. Even the most perfect of things still have imperfections, and as I say so often, it is often that the imperfecti