Monday, January 12, 2004
Pandora's Hope
In a previous entry, I wrote about how rare it is that someone really finds “true love” in this world. For a long time, I had cherished the idea that I might be able to create a truly happy and successful family, but after some disappointing experiences, I began to believe that I had failed. I seemed to be, like so many other people, condemned to live my life in solitude, or at best, in a pale shadow of my impossibly idealistic dream.
My dear mother took issue with that. In an email, she wrote to me:
Minor criticism: I wished that the article on marriage would have been more upbeat. There are some good things about being single.
At first, I wanted to respond to her that I didn’t feel upbeat about marriage at the time I wrote that article, and how could I have written something that I didn’t feel? But then I started to think that my negative attitude was the fruit of a belief that, for whatever reason, I was chosen to suffer in this life, to have my dreams dashed to the ground instead of fulfilled. It seemed impossible that things could have happened as they did if this were not true.
But then I happened upon a very special film in a local DVD store, and it started to make me think again, about the great stories that people have always told and remembered through the ages. How many of them ended with the hero realizing that he was simply chosen to fail and suffer in this life? How many of them allowed our hopes to die? Nearly each story which lasts in our hearts is a Pandora’s Box of turns and disasters, most of them far worse than anything I have known. And in so many of them, the main characters feel exactly the same things that I have felt, and for a moment, they too lose sight of what dreams they know are still worth holding on to.
In the end, that may be the purpose of stories—all of them must contain tension and conflict, or else our hearts will not acknowledge them as true or interesting. Our very lives are about resolving the tensions and conflicts we detest so much, and we require that a story bring out in us a new knowledge or a new faith in our power to be the heroes that our lives require us to be.
Because, while the characters of our favorite stories may be up against all the forces of evil combined, their journeys are just reflections of our own, blown up bigger for us to understand and relate to in a new way. Might it not be heroic to keep on believing in the possibility of love and happy family life—while at the same time appreciating the beauty of being single? In some ways, we are always alone—in our secret thoughts, and in the dreams that even we forget upon waking in the morning. Yet in so many ways, it is only through the others, whom we dare to allow into our lives and hearts, that we learn to make sense of who we are, and come to understand what being alone in a healthy way really means.
We began the journey of life at our mothers’ breasts, drinking on the milk of dependence. Slowly, we have learned to be individuals. And yet we must transcend even that independence in order to become interdependent on those whom we love. In that glorious adventure of relying on others as well as ourselves, hope is indeed a most valuable thing.
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