Hope, defined in general terms as an optimistic state of mind based on an expectation of positive outcomes in respect to events and circumstances in one’s life or the world at large, often inspires us to adjust the focus of our human agency and our place in the world in order to effect a different, more salutary outcome in the face of prevailing detrimental challenges. In this respect hope is a sophisticated cognitive strategy, and not a simple emotion or wishful state of mind.
Another way to formulate the stratagem of hope is to define it as a narrative, often one of meticulous construction. As with any narrative, the transformative effects of hope require the perception of a temporal continuity: drawing upon experience and knowledgeable insight (that occurred in the past) selectively reconstituted as a series of steps and purposeful iterations (performed in a progressive present) that can then be imaginatively applied to a subsequent reality (future) and, if successful, instantiate that future. The perception that a four dimensional space-time persists and is subject to our intervention is a psychological condition necessary for the praxis of hope. But sustaining that perception of fluid time is aggressively perverted by a variety of phenomena, to the extent that may augur our collective demise.
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