Abandon Hope All Ye

"“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate” - Dante’s Inferno (Translation: Abandon hope all ye who enter here)

I think a lot of the time when we are going through a trial we throw ourselves into our own personal hell. We tell ourselves there is no hope, and we abandon all thoughts of things good and focus on the struggle at hand. We convince ourselves there is no hope of making it through the struggle, no hope of being happy, no hope in general. We trap ourselves in a hell we create for ourselves. We abandon all things that once brought us happiness and see the pain, hurt and all things that come with going through hell. We don’t see a way out of our hell.

We like to try and find reasons for us living in these hells; reasons that are not our own. Who wants to admit they created their own hell? We create our own versions of each level of hell, one seemingly worse then the last. Each struggle we go through always seems worse than the last even if it is something we have gone through before. It is so easy for us to lose grip on the hope we are so desperately trying to find.

Even though we say we don’t like the hell we live in, but at the same time it is a sort of comfort zone, something we know and are used to, while at the same time we crave paradise. We are desperately traveling through the hells of life, sometimes getting lost in each “level.” Sometimes we thing we have made it through to the next level or to Paradise, only to realize we have only either traveled in circles or entered into a new “level” of hell.

But how do we find our way out of this hell we create? How do we like Dante make our way to Purgatory and then Paradise? Since we create our own hells, shouldn’t we also know the way out? Or do we simply sentence ourselves to a lifetime of hellish struggles?