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CONVERSATION LESSON

KEEP HOPE ALIVE

AC, what it do?

Not a whole lot.

That’s how people talk where you’re from, right? What it do.

No, that’s actually how some people talk in the south, like in Texas, Houston.

Oh, okay. And what does that mean?

What it do? It just means, how are you? How’s it going?

But nobody should use that expression.

No, no you can use it. I mean I don’t think it’s very common, but some people use it.

Okay, so what are we talking about today?

I think we’re talking about… Well, we’re talking about a lot of things. We’re talking about the kidnapping in Colombia, was it?

Right, Colombia. The FARC.

Right, the kidnapping in Colombia. And we’re talking a little bit about hope, about creative solutions.

Do you have a lot of hope? Are you a hopeful kind of guy?

I’m a hopeful kind of guy, sure.

What does hope mean to you?

It’s a kind of a feeling that happens in the moment, a feeling that things will get better. And I do. I live my life full of hope because I feel like I’m always on an upward slope to things getting better. I feel that way. I know that actually intellectually, I know that’s not 100% true. Life’s full of ups and downs.

It’s interesting that you say it’s a feeling in the moment because of course it is a feeling in the moment but it’s a projection into the future about what you think will happen. I think in this month’s story we describe hope as being a mixture of expectation and belief. This kind of idea of projecting the future, that’s what separates us from the apes.

Really? How do you know that apes don’t have hope? They might have hope.

They might have hope. Like, “Oh, I hope I get something to eat right now.”

Yeah, like a banana or something good.

Right, but I don’t think they have a hope that, “Wow, I hope next year we have a bounty of bananas,” or, “I hope these humans just back off and stop killing us.”

Maybe you need to spend more time with apes, my friend.

You spend some times with chimps?

No, but I imagine that… I hope that they have hope. I just hope that.

I think that is one thing that they say about one of the differentiators.

Between humans and apes.

Well, just animals in general are more in the present moment, at least as far as we know. We actually have a lesson on prairie dogs and while they got a language and they’re communicating, only they’ve never been able to decipher, “Hey, remember what happened yesterday?” or, “Wow, I hope tomorrow it doesn’t rain.”

I wonder. But you know prairie dogs, if you’ve seen them, they stand up from their hind legs and they look up to the horizon. Maybe they’re looking for hope.

I think you’re reaching.

Maybe. It’s interesting because you know Amy Tan, the author from San Francisco?

Yes. What did she say?

Well, she says that–

Prairie dogs? Is this about prairie dogs?

No, she does not say that prairie dogs offer hope or looking for hope. She says that we dream to give ourselves hope. And to stop dreaming, well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.

We dream to give ourselves hope. She’s talking about literally dreaming, like closing your eyes and seeing things in your sleep.

Well, no. We dream, like imagining future possibilities in a hopeful way in order to give ourselves hope. Meaning that there’s a purpose to dreaming to imagining future possibilities in order to give ourselves hope because without that, then it’s like saying we can’t change our fate. So I think hope is maybe connected to–

Well, I mean it sounds like the same thing to me. We’re dreaming about some future

possibility. That is hope.

No, that gives us hope is what she’s saying.

Right, that’s a weird differentiation. I’m not sure I understand that.

I think what she’s saying is that we need to have that feeling that we have the power, we have the possibility, the potential to actually change the future, and that is where hope comes from. Because if you feel that you cannot, you’re powerless to change your fate, to change what’s going to happen to you in the future, if you feel like you don’t have any control over that at all, it leads to hopelessness.

Right, despair. Sure.

Yeah, despair.

But to me that’s what hope’s all about. Hope’s all about the potential for change. You believe in the potential for change, and despair is the belief that nothing good will ever come.

So by that definition, do you believe that hope is a good thing? Is it a necessary thing for well-being?

Well, I never met a hopeless person that was happy.

I wonder about that, though. For example, if you have hope, then you are sure to experience disappointment. And disappointment is a form of suffering. So maybe by not investing in hope, we can learn to deal with what the present moment is.

I think that’s you’re talking about blind hope or not necessarily blind hope but wishing. And I think there’s a difference between wishing and hoping. I think essential to hope is being active and taking action. If you’re just wishing, like I wish things were better, and then things don’t turn out better then you’re really disappointed. But if you’re grounded in reality, you hope for some future thing to happen and you work towards it and then when it doesn’t happen, you change course and you look for a different solution.

That could be. And I think–

But you’ve met some hopeless happy people.

I don’t know if they’re hopeless or not. It’s hard to say. It’s hard to say. I haven’t met any happy people that were in despair. That would be pretty odd. But the people in the story, they’re–

Yeah, let’s get to some real people. I feel like we’re rambling.

Yeah, let’s stop rambling. Let’s start talking about the story. Because these people were kidnapped, taken away from their families, taken away from their communities, taken away from their livelihoods and put into a captive situation way out in the jungle in the countryside in the forest for years. They have no contact with their families.

If you were one of these people and you thought, ‘wow, I can just feel it, I got this hope and they’re going to come rescue me tomorrow, and I know it’s going to happen,’ well, then you’d probably be an idiot because chances are you’d be wrong and you’d be really disappointed. But you can be hopeful and be realistic at the same time and just be open to that possibility.

I think that’s a reasonable type of hope that most people would have.

But I think it’s also really reasonable that a lot of those people and some of those people are still in the jungle. I just looked online. I saw that it’s estimated there are still 1600 people in captivity in the jungle in Colombia, and that’s some decline. I think in the 90s, in the early 2000s it was much more. But to this day there are a lot of people who have been hostages and some of them for over 10 years, I’ve heard. So I think it would probably be more natural to have no hope.

In that situation.

And I think crucial to this story is this Colonel realized it was very important to give them this message of hope because if they weren’t open to the possibility, they wouldn’t be able to seize the moment.

When that moment came. So they did that in a very creative way because I guess there was a history amongst FARC captives that when the government or the military forces would try to rescue them, that their captors would kill them, they would murder them. And that’s probably common knowledge amongst the captors knowing the history. So that would lead to a situation where it would make it very likely that you would be hopeless, you’d be full of despair because you would see no opportunity, no way out. But they found obviously a very creative way to communicate that hope to those people.

And it wasn’t so clear exactly how that played out, but according to the story some people were able to escape and pass important information on and others were just, their spirits were lifted and maybe that made the actual rescue mission go more smoothly because they were ready for it.

But I think I just find that it’s just an amazing story to me how they could take a beat essentially, a rhythm that had meaning and they knew that those captives knew that meaning and disguise it in a form of a song, like a pop song.

Do you know a Morse code?

I don’t. All I know is SOS.

SOS. What’s that?

It’s like 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-1-2-3, 1-2-3. Like that. It’s like ‘help, help, help’. I think it’s something like that. That’s the only Morse code I know.

I saw this video on YouTube, we can post it in the Community, of a guy who was captive somewhere in Asia in the 60s maybe. Maybe it was in Korea, I’m not sure. He was being interviewed for a propaganda piece and he was blinking the Morse code for torture, T-O-R-T-U- R-E, while he was saying what the interviewer wanted him to say so he can pass that message on. Why would he pass that message? Surely people are going to guess that anyways, but I guess he just wanted to show that he still has his sanity and he hasn’t lost it.

Interesting. It’s hard to imagine being kidnapped. Do you know anyone that’s ever been kidnapped?

I was almost kidnapped. We’ll, actually I don’t know if it is true.

Kidnapped by whom?

I didn’t know. I didn’t just make it up. It was unclear. Maybe somebody was trying to kidnap me.

Really? What happened?

This was 20 years ago and I was spending a semester in India.

This was when you were a university student.

Yeah, this was when I was a university student. At that time, I think there were some Kashmiri separatists and they had kidnapped some westerners.

Where was this specifically?

This was Northern India, kind of up against the Himalayas and maybe bordering Pakistan. I remember it was a bad time. There was some European guys that had their heads cut off.

Who had been kidnapped.

Yeah, who had been kidnapped. It was a known fact that’s not a part of India that you’d go to at that time. Now I think it’s safe. I was in Southern India and this car drove up and there were these guys who were really friendly and they had no reason to be really friendly. They just pulled over on the side of the road and started talking to us and saying they were from Kashmir and get in the car, like let’s go up to Kashmir together, we’re driving up there, it’s fantastic there. I was with a classmate named Bryan and he was one of these guys that he just had this faith, this kind of blind faith in the goodness of all humanity. So he was ready to jump into the car. I was like, no. No, we’re not going to Kashmir. Get away from that car. I pulled him away and these guys were really adamant about befriending us and taking a trip together. So we went back to the school and I told the administration there that this had happened and she got this real nervous look on her face and she said we need to have a community meeting today. And then they got in this meeting and they told us that the semester before or two semesters before, some student had been taken away. I don’t remember the details. I don’t know if she was physically kidnapped, but she was brainwashed.

To a certain degree or whatever.

To some extent and her family had to come from the US–

To get her back.

To get her back.

Oh, wow.

I guess that was the closest I came to maybe being kidnapped. What about you. You ever been kidnapped?

No. I’ve never been kidnapped.

You ever heard these… Maybe we even did a Deep English lesson about these companies that you can pay to be kidnapped.

That was a long time ago. You can pay to be kidnapped or pay to have someone else kidnapped.

No, I think that would make you a criminal.

No, but like fake kidnap. Not really kidnapped.

No, I think you pay to have yourself kidnapped and you pay like $1000 or $2000. I guess you give them a range of dates like, at any point between the 1st and the 14th, please kidnap me and these guys will come and throw you into a car, blindfold you, put you in the trunk.

And what’s the purpose of this?

I think it’s just to people like adrenaline junkies who want to feel fear.

But that doesn’t make any sense to me. If you know that it’s fake, how could you feel fear?

Yeah, but if you’re being physically restrained, it’s going on for a long time and throwing you around and sticking guns in your face.

It’s bizarre. Hmmm… Yeah. I don’t know.

So hope. When I think about this guy Bryan, I would put him in the kind of the blind faith, blind hope kind of school of people that probably don’t have the kind of hope that makes you happier. I don’t know. Maybe it does. Maybe it does. But I’ve known a lot of people who no matter what happens, they just think that everything is going to work out and it’s not like they take action to make their future better, they just kind of do it in a passive way. So I think the kind of hope that enriches your life is one that has to include action as opposed to just being passive and happily accepting things like an idiot.

Have you ever been in a situation where hope got you through a difficult time?

Hope got me through. Nothing that comes to mind. What about you?

There was a time where I wished very strongly that situation that circumstances were different.

Yeah, when was that?

When my daughter was sick in the hospital. When she was a child, she had bacterial meningitis.

I remember that.

And that was a medical emergency. She was in the hospital for about a month. And it was unclear whether she would die or whether she would end up brain-damaged or physically incapacitated for life or whatever. Yeah, it was a time of despair, of a lot of sadness and suffering for my wife and I. I do remember really feeling very strongly that things would change but I just didn’t know what was going to happen. So I don’t know if that’s really… Would you call that hope? Like having hope?

I remember that time. I know how scared you were but I also remember you actively researching things and I think that that was the positive side of hope. You weren’t just like, “Oh, I’m giving up. It’s all over. This sucks.” But you didn’t have blind hope. You weren’t just like, “Oh, yeah, it’s definitely going to work out.” You didn’t give up which I think is what comes up in the story about sick people who they find on this hope scale that people who are more hopeful, they have better chances of surviving. And why is that? Well, one of the reasons might be is that their hope sustains their energy to not give up and to seek out other medical solutions and to stay positive and do everything that they possibly can do. While somebody who is really hopeless is just, they’re just going to fold up.

That was a difficult time. It did change and luckily it turned out as best as it possibly could have. My daughter got better. Things changed. But I think that’s kind of an important point to having hope is knowing that things will change and that we do have the power to influence them and change our fate, even though we may project, wow, this is not looking good, it’s headed to a bad direction. But if I assert myself on the situation and I work hard to try and make things different, to try and make things better, that maybe that is where hope lies, as well. Like you were saying before, it’s not sitting back and just feeling hopeless and wallowing in that despair. It’s choosing to take action because you do believe that you can control fate in some way or another.

One thing that I thought was interesting about this one article that I read saying that people who are more likely to survive cancer and other illnesses, they are more hopeful. Maybe they are more hopeful because their condition is better. People whose condition is worse, their body is sending them messages that the end is near and that’s why they’re hopeless. It’s not necessarily that they just don’t have enough belief and that’s why they die. Maybe they’re picking up real messages from their body.

It could be. I think it goes both ways. I think also maybe there are people who hear they have cancer and maybe it’s not at that terminal stage yet but they start projecting the worst and then that causes them not to take the kind of action they need to take in order to possibly change the course of their illness. I guess I could go both ways.

I just heard a funny story a friend told me about. This is completely unrelated. This is about those fasting place, juice fasting place in Thailand, and how the head of this fasting place, her name is Hillary, she advertises how her juice fasting can cure cancer and how she cured herself of cancer. So my friend was there and she said, “So when you got diagnosed with cancer, which hospital did you go to?” She said, “Oh, I didn’t go to a hospital.” My friend was like, “Well, how do you know you had cancer?” And she said, “Oh, I know.” And then she’s advertising that her juicing cures cancer and cures her cancer. She never even got diagnosed with cancer. So there’s also the idiocy of hope.

There’s another aspect to hope that is interesting. If we go back to that quote by Amy Tan about how if we stop dreaming, that’s like saying we can’t change our fate. But the fact is we cannot change our ultimate fate which is death. There’s that interval of between now and when you actually die.

Maybe you can’t.

What’s that?

Maybe you can’t.

Maybe I can’t.

I know a few things.

But you can. You’re going to live beyond death. I see.

I got some options.

You got some ideas, huh?

They’re not 100%.

Well, there’s hope in action right there.

Yeah. I’m going to upload myself to the Deep English website and I’m going to live forever.

As an avatar. A Deep English avatar.

Yes, as the English teaching avatar.

I would like to see that. It’d be funny.

What else you got to say about hope? Weren’t you telling me something about Martin Luther King in hope?

Well, no. I mean, actually, it’s not as much as hope as it is about the necessity of dark times in order to see beauty. I think Martin Luther King something like this: Only in the darkness can you see the stars. So when things are bright, when the sun’s out and the sky is blue, the stars are there, you just don’t see them. A star is representing the brightest, the best, but it’s so far in the distance.

Or if you’re like a star like me, you can’t recognize it because you’re just emanating like. That’s how I feel sometimes. It’s like, I wish I could see the stars but I am one.

You are one so therefore–

No, no. I get what you’re saying. There are no highs without the lows.

You got to experience both in order to really understand happiness. Maybe that’s what it is. We need that suffering, that darkness in order to have hope. Because if things are great, what need is there for hope? I thought that was interesting.

Well, on that note let’s bring this to a close. Keep hope alive, everyone. Don’t fall into despair. We will be back next month with another fantastic English lesson.

You can hope for that.

It’s no hope. Believe it, Believe that, Believe it, All right, See you, everybody.

All right, Adios!