Dr Asangba Tzudir
Hope can be a dangerous thing, but it can also be the best of things. Besides, ‘whatever hope’, life without it seems empty and directionless. Without hope, life can be reduced to an endless grind unceasingly churning out the same thing over and over again producing nothing new.
Looking around, we have awakened to the same old things with its mundane-ness albeit a numerical change. That’s a new year without hope and caught in the same old web of problems, issues and challenges offering hardly anything to look forward to. That is until we start to see and feel and inject hope which is the springboard of life.
Hope being the best of things, the ‘Happy New Year’ greetings and wishes we share with people may simply seem like a ritualistic wish, but it conveys a message of Hope for something new. It also injects a new lease of life, a belief that the New Year holds promise that things will be better, and that it holds a prospect of change for better.
Many a time, it is difficult to see beyond the problems, issues and challenges and thereby fail to see the promises, the ‘newness’ and hope in the new year. Hope is not about optimism for they are not the same. Optimism often can simply be blank, naive, without roots or one that is derived from a pragmatic vision. It can be shallow because it is subject to the changing circumstances of life where the next moment optimism may find itself submerged in the difficult circumstances.
However, the feeling of hope takes one beyond the life’s challenging circumstances through its continued insistence. And within the positivity of Hope it will help transcend the difficult circumstances of life to a world of hope driven belief that a better world will be created which will usher in a new dawn of progress and justice.
Beyond the individual’s cares, a major event that will immediately engage the entire Nagaland is the scheduled State General Assembly election. This event will also serve as a litmus test for the people. It is an opportunity for the people to draw hope for better circumstances of life, for progress, for justice and for a better Nagaland.
There is a threshold between hope being a dangerous thing and the best of things. When Jesus said, “I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth,” Pilate said unto Jesus, “What is truth?” In order for hope to pass through the dangerous threshold, conception of hope should be premised on the truth unlike Pilate’s sarcasm, that, truth should not only be known but spoken for positivity of hope within a meaningful praxis.
However, it is neither easy nor automatic and requires reconciling with truth. To reconcile with truth requires a new heart that sincerely addresses one’s ‘truth factor.’ Until then, this New Year will be nothing except a switch over to another calendar year with a numerical change.
Thus, for ‘newness’ to emerge for the better, there is need for hope premised on truth and where the heart finds reconciled with truth. This will be the beginning of the unfolding of a ‘NEW YEAR HOPE.’
(Dr Asangba Tzudir writes a weekly guest editorial to The Morung Express. Comments can be mailed to [email protected])
