Where will you be in ten years?

The hands of the clock drag you from one moment to the next.

Are things going to get better? Are things going to get worse?

Time looks out and demands an answer.

But you don’t know what to say.

Sometimes, it feels like the world is going to end. It feels like it’s all too much, and there’s nothing you can do. But then, there’s this moment, this moment when you see your friends in a show that they’ve been working on for so long. The show finishes, and you see them up on stage with a look of supreme joy and accomplishment. And when you see that – anytime something like that happens – you can’t help but feel like things are going to get better.

And then, there’s this moment when you go to the endpoint and see someone you love cross the finish line minutes before the cutoff. They collapse into their teammate’s arms in tears of joy and disbelief and exhaustion. And when you see that, and when you start to feel that warmth which spreads from your chest to your entire body, and when your jaw starts to hurt a little from smiling and your hands start to ache from clapping – anytime something like that happens – you can’t help but feel like things are going to get better.

But get better for how long?

One day, you’re not going to wake up. One day, you will be bones rotting under the soil or ashes turning in the wind. One day, you simply won’t be here. But you still will have been here. So, the question becomes, did the time you spent up until the day that you died, did it mean anything at all? You can hope that your life amounts to something. That you being here somehow made the world a better place.

But hope is a terrible, empty thing.

There is no security in hope. Hope doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to buy a house or find the time to tell someone that you love them.

‘I hope that I’ll be happy in 10 years.’

‘I hope that they know how much they mean to me.’

‘I hope that it’ll all be okay.’

Hope is never enough, but perhaps it’s a start.

What would the opposite of hope be? Would it be despair? No doubt despair is horrible, but it’s not empty. To despair is to know that all is lost, while to hope is only to wish that nothing is. Regret? Perhaps regret finds itself more at home with hope than despair does. After all, both deal in imagined pasts or futures.

‘I regret what I said. I regret what I said, but I can’t help but hope they know I didn’t mean it.’

Could you have done anything differently, or in every life are you cursed to walk the same streets and recite the same speeches and cry the same tears and throw up in the same bathrooms and love the same people?

Hope is always the hope that something does or doesn’t happen or has or hasn’t happened. In other words, hope is only hope because it keeps the company of uncertainty. In the instance of despair, hope either vanishes or changes. It vanishes because it has been killed, or it changes because despair has given birth to a new hope, a hope that it was all a dream, or that things are going to be okay, or that things are going to get better. We are held over the abyss on a tightrope stretched between past and future, in a moment marked present, with very limited knowledge of both what lies ahead and what lies behind. Hope is perhaps the only thing that allows us to keep our balance.

To give up on hope is to give up on life itself. Hope is always a wish for things to be better. For the world to be a kinder place, for smiles to be shared and laughter to be heard louder and more often. We can never be entirely sure of the future, of what lies ahead. But we can always hope that what lies ahead will be better than what we have now. 

In ten years, I hope that I’ll be happy. I hope that my loved ones will be happy. I hope that the world will be a better place.