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Amazing April

, by Brigid

Why Was Hope in Pandora's Box? 💭

I have posted this on my Dayre as well. Hope you enjoy the read ~

Background story, in Ancient Greece, there were two brothers; Prometheus and Epimetheus. They had upset the gods, especially Zeus, as Prometheus had stole fire from Hephaestos, a blacksmith. So, Zeus decided to punish the brothers and sent Epimetheus a beautiful woman whom he had created and named Pandora. Prometheus warned his brother not to accept any gifts from the gods but he didn't listen because he was charmed by Pandora's beauty and decided to marry her. Zeus then sent them a wedding gift; a box which he told Pandora to never open.

Of course, it's human nature to be curious and eventually, one day, she gave in to temptation and opened it, expecting to see gold and riches.

She thought wrong.

Zeus had actually filled the box with all the terrible evils he could think of. All the evils of humanity came buzzing out; poverty, disease, misery and so on. The evils stung Pandora repeatedly and she tried slamming the box shut but it was too late.

She started to sob when she heard a little voice come from inside the box. By this time, Epimetheus was consoling Pandora and he told her that there couldn't possibly be anything worst left inside the box so they opened the box again. And inside, they found Hope. It fluttered from the box and touched the wounds created by the evil creatures, and healed them. Even though Pandora had released all the evils of the world, she had also allowed Hope to follow them.

With this story in mind, I started thinking to myself. Why was Hope in the box with all the other evils in the first place? Maybe Hope isn't really what we think it to be; a positive thing. Maybe it's an evil as well, just disguised as a beautiful thing. Whenever we're feeling like nothing is going our way and we're at our worst, the thing that keeps us going is the light at the end of the tunnel and that there is Hope that things will get better.

However, Hope also leads to expectation.

According to the dictionary,

HOPE

həʊp/

noun

1. a feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen.

However, when we expect too much, and something we desire doesn't happen, we tend to get disappointed and we equate that Hope to False Hope.

It's like when we love someone so much and sacrifice everything for them, but they don't seem to do the same despite them insisting they do love you, and you end up disappointed because we expect them to do the same things for us in return. However, everyone loves in different ways and the way one shows love may differ from another. But we tend to forget that and we end up feeling unloved.

But then again, love is a different matter and I won't delve into that right now.

It's also like how if we were to get diagnosed with a terrible illness right now and you feel like you're bound to die but the doctors tell you they're working on a treatment to get you better and you hold on to that Hope that you really will heal but. . . the treatment ends up not working on you, or they take too long to come up with a treatment for your illness. Then you lose all Hope because you really are going to die.

So I guess, Hope really isn't such a good thing because of all the expectation and disappointment it potentially brings.

Edit: I had actually typed everything above a few weeks ago but after talking to Chris about it and he says Hope was in the box with all the other evils because before all the bad things were released, the people were happy and carefree without any problems, hence, there really wasn't any need for Hope at all because there was no misery whatsoever so I guess that theory works too.