I went into the city centre today, as much as you can call High Street Auckland City’s centre. I browsed a bookshop for a couple of minutes and saw “The Audacity of Hope.” I didn’t read the book so I can’t comment on it, but it got me thinking about my own process over the past 6 months.

I have been working on eliminating hope from my mind set. That’s such a good phrase mind set. The set of ideas, beliefs which consitute one’s content and structure of identity.

But I hadn’t paid much attention to hope’s opposite – despair – which is equally a projection of what might be into the future. Now it is time to deal with despair. It strikes me that there is hope because there is despair and there is despair because there is hope. Hope is a dangerous ally, it causes misunderstanding of what is. In the context of business, hope takes too many risks as despair misses opportunities.

Hope and despair arise out of attempts to maintain consistency in one’s self image, i.e. identity. That’s why they’re actually the same thing, just with different bodily sensations attached. Hope is happy. Despair is sad.

It reminds me of Shunryu Suzuki’s council: “Not Always So.” We can’t know ourselves in the future, so why project?