Hope by Vaclav Havel

Václav Havel was an inspirational Czech leader during the turmoil of Czechoslovakian politics during the 1980s and then as the first president of the Czech republic upon its establishment in 1993. He was a statesman, author, poet, playwright and dissident. He was the first democratically elected president of Czechoslovakia and later president of the Czech Republic. As a dissident he was jailed several times, the longest period being four years. 

How does a person maintain hope during difficult times? This is a question I ask myself frequently. There are so many reasons to despair at the direction our world and where politics is headed. Vaclav faced enormous odds but he maintained his commitment to the powerless and the voiceless. And he found a pathway to hope rather than despair.  

Hope

by Vaclav Havel

The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) 
I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. 
Either we have hope within us or we don’t

It is a dimension of the soul; 
it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. 
Hope is not prognostication. 
It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; 
it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, 
or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, 
but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. 
The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is.
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. 
It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. 

In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, 
the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, 
and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, 
is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” 
It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.