Despair is a Choice

Despair is a choice.

It doesn't feel like it in the moment. When you feel like you've be stepped on, crushed, beaten down, or that "last straw" has been snapped, it's the most easy and natural thing to give in to despair.

It presents itself so logically, "why bother trying if all life ends up bringing you is pain and disappointment".

It feels so real and absolute. The emotion is often accompanied by a profound heaviness, sometimes in the form of body sensations that mimic the real experience of being crushed.

But like all of our feelings we have have a choice. We may not choose our initial reactions, but we can learn to choose how we react to our reactions - that is, how we continue to think, and feel, and behave in response to those initial reactions.

To despair is to take on a myopic view of the world. It's as if an electromagnet has been switched on and attracted all the past and present disappointments and failures and darkness in the world. And with all the reminders of those disappointments and failures comes a clear message "don't fight anymore...don't try anymore....it's not worth it... things never turn out right".

To be hopeful in the midst of despair seems unnatural. It is an act of faith. Faith in the sense of believing an unseen reality - of believing that our despair is not how things really are in the world. In a sense it requires us to think and behave as if there were still reason to be hopeful....and letting the feeling change later on.

It's come to me today that hope is something we must practice, more than it is a passing sense of optimism, or something that transpires after a moment of insight. To be hopeful requires a regular work-out of emotional and spiritual muscles that refuse to get stuck in the limited perspective that despair traps us in. It requires us to keep our minds dwelling in the broadest, truest realities of the universe. The realities that affirm that all things are being recreated, redeemed, made new, and restored. That God will not be thwarted in his love and reconciliation. We can see evidence of these realities if we are persistent in choosing to focus our attention on them, and not choose to allow despair to take up residence in our minds.

For me, today is a hard day to practice this. I must make regular, conscious decisions to fight despair and choose hope instead.