Hope as a State of Mind
“Hope is an elixir of life. It is the engine that propels us forward in our pursuit of countless goals, all of which might otherwise be impossible to undertake if we were bereft of hope.” — Gad Saad
In the fight to maintain mental health and resilience, hope for the future is possibly our most important weapon. The movie “The Shawshank Redemption”[1] tells the story of Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), convicted of murder and serving a life sentence in Shawshank Prison. At one point Andy defies prison warden Samuel Norton and is thrown in “the hole”, solitary confinement, for two weeks. After Andy is released back into general population he is greeted by his friends including Red (Morgan Freeman) in the meal hall. The dialogue is as follows -
FLOYD : Was it worth it, two weeks in the hole?
ANDY : Easiest time I ever did.
SKEET : Bullshit. No such thing as easy time in the hole.
HEYWOOD : A week in the hole is like a year.
SNOOZE : Damn straight.
ANDY : I had Mr. Mozart to keep me company.
FLOYD : So they let you tote that record player down there, huh?
ANDY : It was in here… and here (taps his heart, his head).
That’s the beauty of music, they can’t get that from you. Haven’t you ever felt that way about music ?
RED : I played a mean harmonica as a younger man. Lost interest in it though. Didn’t make much sense in here.
ANDY : Here’s where it makes most sense. We need it so you don’t forget.
RED : Forget?
ANDY : Forget that … that there are places in the world that aren’t made out of stone. That there’s something inside they can’t get to, that they can’t touch … it’s yours.
RED: What you talking about ?
ANDY: Hope
Red warns Andy that hope is dangerous, that it can drive a man insane, that “it’s got no use on the inside”.
Czech writer, dissident and the country’s first President, Vaclav Havel, wrote that “Hope is the deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times.” Havel wrote “The kind of hope that I often think about … 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 upon some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
Later in the movie Andy writes a letter to Red, inviting him to try and find hope after decades of denial in prison — “Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
The movie ends with Red violating his parole and heading to the Mexican border — “I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope …”.
[1] The movie is based on the 1982 Stephen King story “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”
