Poet's Journel: Entry 2

Hope.

It's a beautiful feeling. Your heart feels like it's somehow managed to sprout wings and is currently soaring six feet above your head. Butterflies start over-filling your stomach, crowding in every possible space. You feel light as air.

But then the fear sets in. Hope is just as scary as it is beautiful. You start seeing spots. Your heart plummets back to earth. And where butterflies used to be, you are now weighed down with cinderblocks. Darkness begins setting in as your mind clicks away.

What if all this happiness is for nothing?

What if nothing goes as planned?

What if they let you down?

What ifs crowd your brain and they fill you with shear panic. If something does go wrong and you've allowed yourself to hope, it hurts twice as bad. Things are crashing down around you and you're throwing your arms about trying to catch that good feeling again. Trying to figure out where it all turned dark.

You've now sunk deep into the ice water surrounding you. You're drowning in cold sharp pain. Why did you let yourself get here? You hoped, and hope led to this. But this isn't how it's supposed to be! Hope is precious and uplifting. But every time you hope you end up here. You just can't ever see where it all slid downhill. One second it's like the world is full of sunshine and flowers with smiley faces on them. But the next second everything is dark and cold and painful. The fear floods in so fast you never see it coming.

Wait.

A moment of clarity in the pain. Hope is not this at all. This is just what you've turned it into. What you've let it become. You've been hurt too much and seen too many things fall through. So when you feel that overwhelming joy you must counter it! Stomp it out! Smother it! You over-think. You rush ahead to try to ready yourself for the inevitable failure so that it doesn't have to hurt as bad. But you're not saving yourself any pain. You're destroying beauty.

So maybe. Maybe you should allow yourself to hope. Don't brace yourself for what MIGHT happen and don't worry yourself with tomorrow. Take life one day at a time. One step at a time. One breath at a time. One hope at a time.

. . .