An End to Hope — September 10, 2025 – John Agliata

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Shawshank❤️
Shinedown🎶
Eternal Sunshine🌞

THE DAILY UPDATE

The 1994 film Shawshank Redemption, based on the short story by author/god Stephen King, is about many things but none more so than hope. The concept of hope bubbles up throughout the movie and provides the framework for its conclusion, partly illustrated by the GIF above and more fully illustrated by the video clip below.

“I find I’m so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.”

But hope isn’t a universal good, not in Shawshank and not in real life. Earlier in the film, the same man who utters the quote about his hope to see his friend has a different view of it.

“Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”

For more than a half of a decade, I have carried around a hope. With varying degrees of intensity, it has been a central theme in my life. It is no exaggeration to say that I have felt this hope every single goddamn day for more than 2,000 days. That’s a long, long time to hope for the same thing, a thing that never seems to come to pass.

In my life, I have seen the beauty of hope. I felt it when I got to hold my first son, Jacob, who was born four months after we found out he likely wouldn’t live much past birth and who, in fact, might not be born alive at all. I had hoped … hoped … to get the chance to hold him while he was breathing, to tell him all that I wanted to tell him. And I did.

I felt it again when Boy The Elder was born, healthy and here, and again when Boy The Younger was born, screaming from a broken collar bone but otherwise healthy and here.

I have felt that beauty with hope for job opportunities and crisp fall days, for safe travels and an amazing wedding day for BTE. Hope can, indeed, be a good thing … maybe the best of things, as Andy Dufresne says …

“Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.“

So yes, I have felt that side of hope.

But this hope that I’ve been carrying for those more than 2,000 days? I’m not sure how it started, but it has turned into the type Red warned Andy about in the mess hall of Shawshank. It’s proven dangerous, and though it hasn’t driven me off the deep end, it has caused more than its share of angst.

We hope for things we largely cannot control. When a decision or an action is in someone else’s hands — or in the hands of fate or God or whatever it is that governs the chaos that seems to be unfolding around us — all we have is hope. If we can’t affect change, hope is what remains.

I couldn’t control whether there would be some miracle in Jacob’s development that would turn the tiny abnormality that doomed him to his fate into a story I told at his wedding. I couldn’t control whether, after all those job interviews with the same company, the hiring manager chose me over the other guy. I couldn’t choose whether that crisp fall day would turn out to be the one I really needed, really wanted it to be.

So I hoped.

In this case, I have hoped for communication. I have hoped for reconciliation. I have hoped to give an explanation, to receive and explanation, to find an understanding that would allow for a greater sense of peace than what hope alone has left me with. I have taken the actions that I could take to affect the change I would love to see, but there is only so much I, alone, can do to create that change. There may be drastic steps I could take to try to bring about the situation I hope for, but when you’ve caused as much pain to others as I have through this situation and in life in general, there are, indeed, limits.

And so I am left with hope.

I wait. I look for signs. I try to rebuild this parallel life that branched off based on decisions made so long ago, and I am proud of how I have done that. I’ve rebuilt relationships, am starting to forge new ones, have resurrected my career and my creativity. Just this morning I published two articles written with and for some extremely intelligent people, one in Canada and one in Australia. I’m working on another one with a gent in Switzerland and have started the process with a few folks in Mexico City. My side business has me writing about some of the smartest young people doing world-changing things. It’s awesome. I love what I have become personally and professionally.

It’s the quiet moments that hurt, that allow hope to turn from that best thing into the thing that can drive a man insane. When I’m busy, hope is a dim candle. It doesn’t burn and scorch. It illuminates the path I’m on. But when I’m done being busy, well, the quiet is gasoline.

And I can’t always be busy. Lord knows, I’ve tried over these past 2,000 days. When you find the thing that keeps the fire controlled, you do it. But if being busy is that thing, that’s a wonderful recipe to bake up burnout. I’ve done that. Numerous times.

I’ve analyzed this hope from every single angle possible. When I tell you I’ve tried everything to extinguish it, I have tried everything to extinguish it. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about its nature. This hope is very cyclical. It ebbs, yes, and somewhere in days 100 to 1,000, I might have thought, “Sweet! The tide is receding forever!” But I’ve learned how foolish those thoughts are. The floodwaters always return. Always. So I’ve stopped thinking during the cycle’s calmer moments that that’s how things are going to stay. This makes life very hard to live. When you know the inferno is just around the corner and you can’t stop driving yourself straight into the middle of the flames, that’s … difficult, to say the least.

Yesterday driving home from work was a drive into that inferno. A few things have happened of late to pour gasoline on the candle flicker of hope. They are my own fault, like this entire situation is, and so I don’t seek sympathy, not from anyone else and not from myself. But I do seek relief. In those moments when the fire is growing, growing, growing, there are so many thoughts. To run. To act … again. To give up.

What’s the opposite of all that? When you’re not running and not acting and not giving up? What’s the opposite? I’m not sure what the term is, but what it does is leave you exactly where you are. No change. Nothing different. Still hoping.

This morning, I woke up and was immediately discouraged. If this is something like Day 2,545, it’s just another day with the same hope. As I was getting ready for the work-from-home day, I thought “Something has to give. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep holding onto this hope, a hope to change a situation I can’t affect, a hope that relies on waiting, waiting, waiting, a hope that could be realized with one conversation that I can’t start. I just can’t keep doing this. I can’t.”

In this whole Rebuilding Me project that has been going on for somewhere between six and 30 years, I have done the hard thing when I’ve had to. I found the strength to face what we faced with Jacob … and it’s afterbath. I found the strength to confront my inner demons, to deal with the situation with my Birth Parents and sibling, to address the underlying things with my mental health and the overt consequences of not addressing them sooner. I’ve fixed. I’ve resurrected. I’ve rebuild. I’ve gone on. Never once have I given up. Not once. Oh, maybe I relented for an evening or a day or a week. But every single goddamn time I’ve been knocked down, I have gotten back up to continue.

A trusted advisor has advised me to put a time limit on this hope. I have resisted. If that time limit were, say, 10 days, and a communication came on Day 11 that could change the situation in the way I’ve wanted to for the previous 2,000, am I really going to ignore it? On Day 100? On Day 1,000?

His response to my pushback? “Yes. You would. You should. You have to. Limbo is no place to live.”

Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. Hope is dangerous and can drive a man insane.

Yes.

Something I’m grateful for today: That someone somewhere at some point figured out how to make cookies.

Song of the Day: Hope, by Shinedown

Meaningful Lyric From the SOTD:

Look at the battle we’re in
I was never one to pick a fight I couldn’t win
Look at the secrets we keep
They terrorize me every night in my sleep

Afternoon tea with the impending doom
Counting the elephants here in this room

You can be twisted but still optimistic
Be the black sheep but not a statistic
May not know who you are
But you know what you’ve got
So hang on to the absurd
Hey, have you heard?
Hope’s not a four-letter word

Something I’ve written or ghostwritten: Eternal Sunshine, 20 Years Later

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