Hope & Fear

She walks in cool, calm, collected. Her dark heels click to the tiles in seemingly rehearsed coordination. Perfectly poised and planned. Her glasses perch at a vogue angle on her nose, eyes wide and alert – quickly scanning the room calculating every possible scenario that she could fathom and a possible reaction. She wears a tweed blazer and a matching skirt, in a regal (albeit far too mature for her age) yellow with dark undertones. Her hair is dark and she is in control. Fear is not withered. Fear is not cowering in the corner, hiding herself.

No, she is not.

Hope glides in on her bare feet, on her tip toes just for fun. She wears a long, white flowing garment and you can’t quite distinguish her body shape beneath it- but you know she is simply lovely. Hope is simple yet frivolous. There is not much to her at face value – her complexities only emerge when you begin to make enquiries; but most people are happy to simple sit and look at the way her hair glistens in the sunshine.

Hope does not rule, she simply is.

I would rather be fear.

The revered Nelson Mandela once said that he hopes our choices do not reflect our fear, but rather our hopes. Yet, what is wrong with making life decisions based on our fears? Making decisions within the bounds of a given situation to mitigate future perils appears rational to me.

I wonder, what is wrong with being a fearful person? A fearful person is not backed into a corner because she has thought about each window in the room and the number of glass panels comprising the windows and how she could kick them out if she needed to. Fear knows every centimetre of the room and makes her decisions such that she isn’t in the corner. She is Baby from Dirty Dancing – and has taken the calculated risk to make that terrible joke knowing someone out there will cringe reading it.

Indeed, the next question would be what fear would do when put into a completely different house let alone a new room. Fear probably knew this might happen because fear has a close friend called Paranoia who likes to play on the tight rope of Fear’s nerves. Consequently, because Fear thought this may happen – fear is not jarred and instead attempts to pre-empt and solve the new house’s issues.

The crisis, it appears, is when fear becomes paralysed. Then, there is neither Hope nor Fear, rather a senseless melancholy from which no inspirational quote can save you and instead you must pray for Hope.

This is because Fear and Hope works hand in hand – because Fear is there to protect the goals that fragrance Hope’s skin and dance on Hope’s lips. Once you have Hope, I suppose, stashed away in a corner of your heart with a desired outcome, you can let yourself be guided by whatever means you find necessary to pursue it.