a fifth reflection...'hope, faith and the chicken's egg'

Oh, were it not for the faint odour of hope!  The sweet, sweet whiff that disappears as quickly as the smell of a baker’s dozen on the breeze, but locks in the sense memory and leads one into a continual cycle of promise, disappointment and recrimination.  For in life, as in the throes of death, we are forever on the edge of something beautiful; and yet how many of us really trust to leap into the foggy gap and have faith!?  Faith in what you may ask, where, to begin with at least, faith in anything will do, whether it be God and all his many mis-shapes, moaning pop-stars washed in by a tide of faded glories, eleven unlucky boys of Red, or simply faith in good company and the restorative powers of the amber poison (up to a point!). 

Above all the key to achieving more than transient joy is perhaps to understand the interplay between hope and faith.  Life coaches, business managers both half strangled by their corporate ties will preach from under corporate wigs the importance of ‘expectation management’.  In the simplest essence they mean don’t get ahead of yourself, and yet in the race to the grave who is, in fact, tripping over their shoe-laces with haste?  We want to live, we want to love, but we don’t want to catch something we might become ashamed of.  And to be unhappy in these day-glo days is to present a pasty face, inviting the often meaningless, and impossible to answer platitude: ‘are you OK?’.

Are we OK?  Well, we hope so.  But we are only OK, or sometimes happy, as far as circumstances allow.  And circumstances rely on other things being in order, often outside of our direct control.  For when the old woman in us all dies, without a developing basis for faith, surely the dog in us all will follow soon thereafter, stricken by an internal, bleeding grief?  When the bright, vivacious and life-giving young drama student in us all departs, without a developing basis for faith, surely we’ll feel so very old and redundant?

Chicken and eggs, egg and chickens - not by the way a hangover cure - but which comes first, hope or faith? Maybe it is enough to have some kind of faith in a dream that can last, or a life that can regenerate, and then hope can linger, even in the great swamp of human existence, rather than turn putrid, sully the heart, and scourge the soul.