What to do when all hope is gone

And why you’re finally where you need to be.

Speak to anyone outside of elite sport, and you quickly realise they don’t quite get it. And in truth, how could they? When your sport shapes every decision in your life, that bubble can become pretty intense. When to go to bed, what to eat, when to eat, should you go out and socialise or rest at home? Just a number of day-to-day considerations for elite sportspeople. When you add this on top of a training schedule (which may be planned out for the rest of the year), It’s easy to understand how and why hopes and dreams are built around the outcomes of our efforts.

Let's set the record straight, I’m not here to put a dampener on possibly the greatest human attribute, hope. But there is a point when it no longer serves us. In a sporting context, where would we be without it? The team that makes the impossible comeback, the fan watching who never gives up, or perhaps the athlete midwinter, on all fours, throwing up after sprinting up a hill. Would the work get done without hope? Would we push ourselves to the frankly bizarre lengths we do for a game? Without the promise of some return?

“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.”

Desmond Tutu

For me and many other sports people, it was the fuel for the fire. It got me out of bed in the morning, out of the door when it was raining, and back up again when I’d been sick. It clearly serves us so well until it doesn’t. What happens when our hope meets a bad result? Sure, at first, we shake it off and stand strong but what about after the second, third, or hundredth time? For most, myself included, it began to fade until it seemed I was wrong to have ever hoped for more than I currently had.

“Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

And this rather accurately and scarily describes my career. Agony on repeat. Unable to let go of hope because it would mean that I was accepting defeat. It would mean that I was accepting that my dreams would never happen. And then, if that was true, what did that mean about all the sacrifices I had made? I wanted them to mean something to me and the people around me.

And herein lies the problem with Hope. It does not exist without an attachment to the future. 

It will be better.

I will achieve ____.

When I achieve ____, I will feel ____.

Feel free to fill in the blanks. The problem with this thinking, which I didn’t see at the time, is that it separates us from where we’re designed to be. It’s so easy to think that by giving up on hope, we are embracing its opposite, despair. But in those times when I gave up on what might be when I could no longer muster the strength to support my dreams, or the weight of the evidence in front of me appeared irrefutable. I didn’t experience despair or perform poorly; in fact, quite the opposite.

The absence of hope isn’t despair; it’s peace. In this acceptance of reality, in neutrality, I excelled. I was no longer striving for something that “I” had decided needed/should happen. I was okay with it; however, the chips would fall. 

And this is the irony of one of the greatest human attributes: it will get us through Hell, but it can never take us to heaven. Because when we give up on our dreams, we find that we’re already there. And where we are is where we always play at our best from, not in the idea of some unattainable future, one that we constantly kick down the road.