Hope as a Discipline.
‘You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.’ - Admiral James Stockdale
How much could they carry? How much more could they walk? When and where would they find food, a place to sleep, or a place to light a fire? In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, nothing moves save the ash on the wind. It’s no one’s land. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Cruel, lawless men stalk the roadside, lying in wait. Roaming together are a boy and his father protecting him, attempting to survive. At every curve there was nothing. So much nothingness that they started to recognise it. How many equal sights and endless loops without finish lines? What lay ahead, what didn’t?
There were times when the father sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn’t about death. He wasn’t sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Do we price courage so high because it is unusual? Do we give peace a cheap price?
What was hope for the father wasn’t hope for the boy. It never was the case.
In one of those nights the boy wakes up scared from a dream and would not tell his father what it was.
You don’t have to tell me, the man said, It’s all right.
‘I’m scared.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘No it’s not.’
‘It’s just a dream.’
‘I’m really scared.’
‘I know.’
The boy turned away. The man held him. Listen to me, he said.
‘When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand?’ says the father. ‘And you can’t give up. I won’t let you.’
The point of the story is not about persisting for a light at the end of the tunnel, no. The point is seeing the light right there. The father was doing what he knew he should be doing. He could only protect the boy. Sometimes life is just asking us for that.
In an example of radical faith through the most brutal facts, admiral James Stockdale faced the same challenge while being tortured over twenty times in over eight years as a prisoner of war in the ‘Hanoi Hilton’ during the Vietnam War. He didn’t know when it was going to be over, if at all. He was unsure if he would ever see his family again. But fortunately he was somehow prepared, because he had philosophy. He returned to Epictetus’ Enchiridion. ‘Demand not that events should happen as you wish,’ wrote Epictetus around 2,000 years ago, ‘but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.’
Confronting reality, Stockdale was doing everything he could to create conditions that would help other prisoners survive unbroken. Building a clandestine system of encrypted messages to help them overcome the isolation that their captors tried to create, and even more, constant sessions of physical torture. Stockdale took the burden for the rest. Not only did he survive, but he became a stoic legend as the highest-ranking United States military officer.
‘Who didn’t make it out as strong as you?’ author Jim Collins asked him, and Stockdale, who was used to long silences, responded promptly ‘it’s easy, the optimists.’ Those who said, we’re going to be out by Christmas, and Christmas would come and it would go, and we’re going to be out by Easter, we’re going to be out by Thanksgiving, we’re going to be out by Christmas again, and it would come and go, and they died of a broken heart. Jim Collins framed this as the Stockdale Paradox. A lesson that Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl also noticed, when claiming that those who didn’t make it were the ones with naive optimism, living in the damage from wishful thinking.
In perilous times the world can ask us for more than we can give, but not more than what we are capable of giving. And sometimes we experience setbacks that belong to us, but many times we will also face ones from which there is no excuse, no one to blame. An accident, a loss, an illness, an event outside of our control.
But life asks us to keep going.
It’s the difference between hope as a feeling and hope as a discipline. It’s a radical reminder that all emotions are transitory when we have a sense of duty. It’s doing the right thing in what gives fear doing. To finish the job. To show yourself. To protect the boy. To survive. Even when the results are not coming. Even when we don’t know what’s on the other side. Even when no one’s watching. Especially when no one is watching.