Esperando

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Spanish class and within a few sentences, my teacher used the word "Esperar" in two different ways, but I understood her. But it did raise some questions for me, and so I asked her after class "So, in Spanish, the verb 'esperar' means both 'to hope' and 'to wait'?" She said yes.

This was quite interesting to me. Especially since a few weeks ago, I taught a class thematically based on Hope, and Christina and I two days later had a conversation about Faith and loss thereof. I found it interesting the views we have about Hope and Faith.

In my class I taught how we have times when Faith completely fails us. We loose any belief in anything, we feel that something important to us has been stolen, sometimes even by other people, sometimes by our experiences, sometimes by the fact that things don't go our way. Our Faith is lost. But we always have Hope. That is something that cannot be taken from us unless we consciously choose to let it go. That being said, I think it's kind of funny that in some instances, Hoping is really just Waiting.

Sometimes, if Hope is all you have, all you can do is Wait. Just keep existing, just keep Waiting. Of course I'm flippantly using the word "just" and as we (at least some of us impatient ones) know, it can be quite difficult to "just" wait or "just" exist. I've definitely had many experiences over the last year with people, school, yoga, traveling, and whatnot that honestly seem to have made me loose faith in... well... just about anything, everything, and everyone. That the variability, the coincidence, the mutability, and this supposedly "Graceful flow" of life is really just a matter of shit simply happening for whatever reason or no reason at all. Pure Lila. And being someone who has wholeheartedly chosen to place my faith and heart (Shraddha in Sanskrit translates to "Shradd" meanings "to place" and "ha" meaning "heart") in certain areas, only for every single one of them to fall out or short of my expectations, has been... well... disappointing.

It is said that the main lesson in the Bhagavad Gita is to act without being attached to the result. Win or lose, achieve or not achieve is unimportant, but acting is what we do. But if you don't achieve or get results, what is the point in acting? What is the payoff? It seems to me that unfocused action is basically the same as unintelligent blundering. So is the lesson of the Bhagavad Gita just to act the fool? To know and care of nothing, just continue to exist? To fight, but for nothing? To Hope and Wait, but for nothing? To know that I know nothing? At this point, I seem to be inadvertently moving into a Buddhist philosophy of "the great nothing/void."

So this really only brings me to the conclusion that Hope seems to be supremely inspiring while Waiting seems to be horrifically depressing. But they are the same thing. One extreme and the other mutually exist while we are simply stuck in the middle getting closer to neither one. So why? Or at least, why has this subject become meaningful to me when I once knew that I understood nothing of this and was satisfied?

Okay, honestly, I did not write this with the intention of it becoming so depressing, but I guess that's just the way things go.