I was cooking today when a fly buzzed around unexpectedly. The possibility of a fly entering the apartment wasn’t much since I hadn’t opened a single door or window in three days. Yet, there it was, buzzing around. I started trying to chase it out. I followed it to the hall when I paused, and there I was, standing in my shorts, a spatula in one hand and a flip-flop in another, chasing a fly out, and looking absolutely ridiculous.
In what seemed like an out of body experience amidst the absolutely mundane, it hit me. It hit me that while I stood there, someone just might be making a decision which affects me, and I could never know it. It could be anyone, and maybe I knew them, and maybe I didn’t, and yet, all I had in that moment was immense hope. It was this hope that this life was changing forever, and I couldn’t see it but I felt it.
Us human beings, we don’t have much to go on but hope. We are a particularly hopeful species. We tend to look on the bright side more often than we don’t. Things have been bleak currently, and yes, it seems like the end of the world, and yes, there will be repercussions, but we will get through, and it’s important to hope for it.
We don’t hope because it is the right thing to do or because we read it in a book or saw it in a movie, we hope because we’ve evolved that way. We hope because it is quite frankly, our best shot. We keep doing what we do, and we keep hoping, and often, chasing a fly becomes a story of a lifetime. Maybe not mine, no, but that’s not how hope works.
You see, hope travels with the randomness, with all the decisions each one of us makes, stacking on top of one another into an epic collision course until it all aligns for one person on a random day. We push hope around, ever so slightly, hoping it hits us right back, eventually.
Hope hits us when we least expect it. It hits us when we’re not looking for it. Hope is sneaky that way, it comes in from behind, and engulfs us completely. Hope is sly. It comes when we’re standing with a spatula in one hand and a flip-flop in another. It comes in as a fly that somehow sneaked into the apartment whose doors were closed for days.