Do you find yourself constantly looking to the future for the next best thing? Does it seem like no matter what you accomplish it’s never enough for you? Are you waiting until you get something in the future to be happy? If you said yes, this post is for you.

Hope and fear are often thought of as opposites, so it is natural to presume that they don’t have much in common – but is that really the case? Depending on your perspective, they have much more in common than you might think. This post will explore the similarities of hope and fear, and offer a third alternative: trust.

The Tao Te Ching

Before discussing the similarities of hope and fear, I’d like to introduce the source of this post’s title: the Tao Te Ching as translated by Stephen Mitchell – my favorite book. Lao Tzu wrote this in the 6th century BC, roughly 2500 years ago. The pages within are filled with profound philosophical ideas that inspire new ways of seeing the world.

Each page is considered a chapter, that characterisation appropriately captures the depth of the ideas on each page. The quote “hope is as hollow as fear” comes from my favorite page in the book, Chapter 13:

Success is as dangerous as failure.
Hope is as hollow as fear.

 

What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure?

Whether you go up the ladder or down it,

your position is shaky.

When you stand with your two feet on the ground,

you will always keep your balance.

 

What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?
Hope and fear are both phantoms
that arise from thinking of the self.
When we don’t see the self as self,
what do we have to fear?

 

See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
then you can care for all things.

 

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, translated by Stephen Mitchell, Chapter 13

Isn’t Hope Good Though?

Oftentimes hope is seen as a very good thing, something which is vital for continuing on and struggling through hard times. We use it as a way to motivate ourselves with the idea that things will get better, that we will have something in the future that we think is lacking right now.

Yet this book equates hope with fear, what could they be getting at?

Perhaps you’ve heard the metaphor of dangling a carrot, referencing someone dangling a carrot in front of a donkey to motivate it to move forward – yet the carrot is always just out of reach. That carrot is a good analogy for hope – it’s suspended in the future, just out of reach from the present.

When you hope for something, you begin to build anticipation and expectation. You have your eyes set on getting something in the future, something you believe will make you happy. You may find yourself perpetually seeking and striving for the next best thing instead of finding gratitude for what you have.

If you keep your focus on the future, you miss opportunities to truly enjoy the moment right now.

Forms of Attachment

While hope relates to our imagination of how the future should be, fear relates to our imagination of how it shouldn’t be. They are both based on either gaining or losing worldly possessions, experiences, or relationships.

In other words, hope and fear represent your personal preferences and aversions – your attachments to the way things should be.

Holding on to hope and fear prevents you from fully accepting the way things are, thus preventing you from finding inner peace. As long as you are attached to an idea of how things should be, you will create suffering for yourself.

When you find yourself imagining the future and building anticipation, take the opportunity to pause and observe how it affects you. Notice how your emotional state becomes dependent upon what your hoping for. Use that as a cue to pull back from thinking about the future and ground yourself in the present moment – right here, right now.

Hope and Fear Reinforce One Another

Since hope and fear are two sides of the same coin, they also build off each other – we may be afraid that what we hope for doesn’t happen, or hope that what we fear won’t happen.

I have noticed that the more I hope for something, the more potential I find for fear. By projecting myself into the future through hope and its imaginations, I set the stage for fear to alter those imaginations from a happy ending to a sad one.

If you are emotionally dependent on a future event, you become less emotionally resilient. The future is uncertain, depending on it for happiness is unreliable.

So if not hope, then what?

Trust.

Where hope and fear are hollow, trust is solid. It is firmly rooted in the present, in the way things are.

Release Your Attachment Through Trust

I find it helps to remind myself that I got here, to this moment, just fine despite all of the hopes and fears of my life. Neither my hopes nor my fears have come to pass for the large part, they’ve only built anticipation and altered my emotional state.

You can never truly know what will happen, but you don’t need to. If you are present, you can deal with whatever situation may arise when it does. Furthermore, adversity is often a great teacher – even the worst situations have lessons to be learned.

By trusting in the way things are, you release attachment to the outcome of your actions. Without attachment, you are free to go with the flow of reality.

Instead of projecting your consciousness into the future, use it in the present so that you can take the best action available. That is the only control you really have in life, and it’s all that is needed. Use your energy to direct yourself in each moment and trust that that is enough.

Expand Your Sense of Self

The primary teaching in Chapter 13 of the Tao Te Ching is to “see the world as yourself.” This goes directly against how we are raised in Western society, which tends to be more self-centered and ego-driven. Yet this view can be supported with some help from quantum physics.

At the core of quantum physics is the discovery that electrons, which are often thought of as particles, actually behave more like waves – energy. It is only when we can sufficiently detect the location of an electron that it behaves like a particle. This was discovered from the double-slit experiment if you want to learn more.

I’m not going to jump into a physics lesson here, but the core understanding is this: the building blocks of our physical world seem to be non-physical. An atom is composed of more space than anything else, therefore you and I and everything else is too.

In a very real sense, we are all energy – we are interconnected with everything else that exists in the entire universe.

Find Comfort in the Impermanence of All Things

In order to have hopes and fears you must have an identity that they relate to, typically yourself, your family, or your community. If you expand your sense of self to include all of existence, beyond all opposites, you’ll find there is nothing to fear. Things come and go, beings live and die, but energy is timeless – it can’t be created nor destroyed.

When you are caught up seeking and striving, you’re forgetting that in a hundred years it will all be meaningless anyway – nothing physical lasts. The real value doesn’t come from physical things or achievements, but rather from finding joy in the way things are and spreading love to the people in your life.

Recognize that you are enough, and nothing you do will change that. You can still achieve whatever you like, but you don’t need to take it so seriously – you can do it with the lighthearted spirit of play instead.

Practice seeing and loving the world as yourself. By expanding your sense of self, you gain an immense amount of empathy – hence the final words of Chapter 13: “love the world as yourself; then you can care for all things.”