I have developed the habit of coming home from work and making a beeline to my bed. I seem to be running out of gas much too early these days.

The flipside is that I end up waking up around 9pm, unable to go back to sleep. Usually I sit in front of the computer making my rounds around the blog ring, but I really only frequent Boing Boing, digg, Slashdot, and the front page of del.icio.us (which I actually find less useful than their previous format, but what are you going to do? Oishii is a good alternative view of del.icio.us) and on the occasion that they have a new post, I find Damn Interesting, well, damn interesting. And if I’m not feeling too depressed and don’t mind getting assaulted by the farcical but deadly antics of the Bush administration, I tune in to Atrios from time to time, although despite the marked presence of the blogospheric Left, I’m starting to feel that the U.S.-as-we-knew-it is gone forever.

But today I decided to take a different tack. It all started with a trip down to the Coffee Bean for some sweets that essentially served as my dinner. (The last time I cooked myself a meal that involved more than pushing buttons on the console and pressing START was a long time ago.) I should know better than to pump myself full of sugar.

In a brief rush of mania, I felt the urgent need to go see the ocean. If you don’t count the brief view of the Pacific off of the I-5 just south of San Clemente, I really haven’t seen the ocean for two weeks (which seems a forever ago.) I found myself in OB, idling on the end of Newport Ave. listening to the waves crash. But the sugar rush eventually wore off. I felt myself feeling lost and apprehensive for unfathomable reasons.

Driving aimlessly through the streets of Point Loma, I found myself wondering if this was going to go on interminably. (It didn’t help that I found myself passing 7-11 after 7-11, as if I were caught on some endlessly repeating street.) Meaning, would I, 20 years from now, find myself doing the same thing in the middle of the night, aimlessly driving by myself through random neighborhoods looking for God only knows what?

I suppose that that’s what I’m dreading. Times like this, I find myself only able to contemplate the two extremes: chaotic, catastrophic, uncontrolled, devastating change, or deadening, mind-numbing, soul-killing sameness. For some reason, I can’t imagine what it would be like to be somewhere in between: a controlled, planned change in my way of life, taking things one step at a time, considering and revelling in every moment.

I guess it’s because I’ve gotten too used to everything being completely out of my hands. Learned helplessness. I blame my mother for being too overprotective. Oh well.

So the possibility that my destiny lies almost entirely within my own hands is in many ways completely terrifying, and it pains me to think that some people would die to have this type of freedom. It’s not that I don’t want it, it’s just that I don’t know what to do with it.

The instinctual thing to do that I learned from my father is to run away.

It’s easy to blame things on your parents.

Clearly, I am simply avoiding responsibility.

But getting back on the freeway, I thought to myself, what do I need right now? Water. And a chance. No, even better, water, and hope.

I’ve come to realize that hope and despair are not really opposites of each other—they are quite intimately tied together, merely two different ways of looking at the same thing. If I had a penny for all the times that I hoped and wished for certains things to come true, only to have my hopes dashed to pieces, I would have at least paid off my educational debt by now. So hope is never a promise of happily-ever-after.

Hope is about running on fumes. When you’ve got nothing left, when you’ve given your all, and you ain’t got no mo’, all you’ve got left is hope. Without it, you might as well give up, sit still right where you are and rot. Without hope, there is no point.

Hopelessness, which generally degenerates into apathy and abject depression, is nowhere near the equivalent of despair (despite the fact that etymologically, despair pretty much translates into no-hope, although not exactly.) Hopelessness is the state you find yourself in when you have learned helplessness, when you’ve accepted the idea that whatever you do won’t make a difference, so you may as well not try. Despair is pretty much hope when the needle on your gas-tank is way past empty, the fuel indicator has been lit for the past 60 miles, and there are no gas stations for the next 100 miles. Despair is when it seems like there’s no way in hell that your hope will possibly come true, and yet you can’t let go of that hope because it’s all you’ve got. Charles Bukowski said it best when he said that “if you don’t have much soul left and you know it, you still got soul.” Despair can be excruciatingly painful. Learned helplessness and depression is about not being able to feel any damn thing at all.

I guess that’s what can be hard about lifting yourself out of depression. The way out is the same way as the way in, so you have no choice but to pass through that stage of despair again. So you can either choose to be hopeless and numb, or hopeful and suffering. I think it takes quite a while before you succeed in filling up that gas tank of hope, and sometimes it’s just easier to stop hurting.

But, as Sting and the Police sing, “Only hope can keep me together. Love can mend your life, but love can break your heart.”

So I thought about simple hopes. Like, for example, the hope of quenching your thirst. It has been literally 18 hours since I drank a drop of water, and I am damn thirsty. So I thought about how great it would be to get a drop of water onto my dry lips, letting it moisten my tongue and my parched throat. That’s my other metaphor for what hope is. If I could bottle that shit up, I’d make billions.

So after about half-an-hour spent driving around randomly wasting oh-so-precious gas, I went to the supermarket. Being the non-tap water drinking snob that I am, I went to Ralphs to buy some water. There is nothing in the world, especially for someone like me, like actually getting what I want. Such a simple thing. And all I had to do was get it. And what really is the difference between a simple thing and a complex thing, other than how long it might take me to get where I want to go?

What I’ve got to instinctually understand (and it’s not enough to intellectually know this) is that I can make a difference. That I have agency in this world, and that I can get what I want if I use what knowledge and experience I do have to make rational plans for getting what I want. And by relying on my courage and perserverance to stick to that plan. It’s no magic formula. And it’s not just about suffering (although there may be quite a bit of that nonetheless.) It’s not just about having a road map and knowing where all the places are. You’ve got to actually plan your route, visualize your destination, and then go.

It’s always the beginning that’s the hardest. It’s like getting out of the sinkhole that is depression. The greatest suffering is in the beginning. But then it gets easier.

It’s too easy to get discouraged, to get turned aside by things interpreted wrongly, to have doubts, to second-guess, to just stick with what you know for sure, even if all you know for sure is how to be numb and empty and helpless.

I’ve spent a huge part of my life in this particular metaphysical place, and I know it’s time to move on. And not by random acts of (mostly mental) violence which frequently have calamitous results and which land me in places I never intended to go. For perhaps the first time in my life, I’m going to try to take complete responsibility for everything I do, without flagellating myself for all my perceived and real personal flaws, and without blaming Chance for my missteps. (I am suddenly reminded of a quote from Thomas Edison: “I haven’t failed. I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” But then there is the sarcastic wisdom of Homer J Simpson: “Trying is the first step to failure.”)

So, in a twisted interpretation of Nietschze himself, I have to learn not fear failure. Because failure is either fatal, or it isn’t. Either way, there’s no point in worrying about it.

As Cicero once said, ”Dum spiro, spero” or as my ancestors may have said it, ”Hanggat ako’y humihinga, may pagasa pa.” As long as I can still breathe, I can still hope.