Where there is life, there is hope.

Earlier I watched A Theory of Everything, the movie about Stephen Hawking, one of my childhood heroes, alongside Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan. At the end, he was asked where he drew his strength from, considering his illness, and he replied, where there is life, there is hope. This struck me particularly at that moment as profound, as life seems to weigh down on me from all sides with despair, almost all the time... mainly because of my addiction. It truly is a hideous thing to have strapped to you. Slavery, permanent bondage, is what it is to me, and those thoughts rose up when I heard those words from that movie. But am I not alive? I kind of marveled at the seeming contradiction of being alive and being an addict; that life is the medium of my addiction, but where there is life, there is hope. It didn't make sense, but it made me feel better.

Then later, as I was walking to the store, I was reading The Way of a Pilgrim again. Dax gave it to me for my birthday. I'd given my copy away, as it was given to me. I'm tired of being separated, and I want to be excited again, and that book is what first got me excited about Orthodoxy. At the part where the pilgrim was robbed, he was in despair, and was ruminating on how he would have been better off killed than robbed of his Philokalia and Bible. When I read that, something in my mind went 'hey'. It nagged at me, and I couldn't get rid of the feeling. I had to stop reading to think about it; what it was that was pushing at the bottom of my thoughts. Then I remembered, it was from that movie I'd just watched. Is being an addict worse than having a crippling disease? Is being robbed of your spiritual food worse than being an addict? Is having a crippling disease worse than being robbed of your spiritual food? But where there there is life, there is hope for all of those things, I guess.