As I watched a re-run of Downton Abbey the other night, a flippant remark of the family matriarch caught my attention: “Hope is a teaser, designed to prevent us to accept reality.” Wow, I thought, so witty and to the point. But then it made me think. Actually, what is hope?

After a lot of pondering, I came to the conclusion that – at least for me – hope is a form of expectation. And as it is always with expectations, it aims at something in the future. So, and this came to me as a shock, hope is also about lost control. That got me really going.

By hoping that something will happen, we have formulated in our mind a desire that something will come – sometimes, in an uncertain future. It’s like a dream and if we do not do anything to make this dream come true, we lost control of the flow of events. Wait a minute, I thought, what about peace? By hoping for peace, I concluded, we express our uncertainty that it will actually come – and our willingness to leave it to the chance.

And there is another danger, I realized, if we start seeing this thing we are hoping for as a goal in itself rather than a platform for future action. Deep in our heart, we harbor the hope that peace will come, somehow, some day. But what are we going to do with it if it comes?

It is like winning a lottery when we do not know what to do with the money and how to utilize the winnings. According to statistics, most winners of this caliber end up poor again soon. Hoping for peace or a better future, we are unclear about what it means, what is necessary to be done, and how are people going to respond if they get it.

So, what does hope mean for you?