The future is my biggest fear. It is falling blindly, head-first, into a pool, hoping there will be water in it. It is sticking your hand into one covered box of many and hope it’s filled with cupcakes or candy, rather than snakes or spiders. It is the unknown.

The unknown relies on trust, hope, and belief. It is trusting yourself to choose the right path, the right person, the right job, the right home. Waking up to take on the day is the riskiest decision you’ll ever make. Because, in that one day, you could choose wrong; you could choose B, when the right answer was A. You must trust yourself from the first waking second of each day to the last in order to be able to choose correctly. So could my biggest fear be trust?

With trust, there is hope. The hope that you will choose right, or the hope that you already did. Who you are now is just a series of the right and wrong decisions you’ve made thus far. There will always be an instance where you hope for a different outcome than what actually happened. You hope for something new to begin, or maybe something old to come back. With everything you trust, you hope you put your trust in the right place. Hope is one of those things that exists where you can’t see it. It’s everywhere, all around and in everyone at all times, like air, in a sense. Some people lose hope, they doubt it. They “believe” they don’t need it to survive, to continue their lives. But could you survive without air? Could you survive without the only thing the world can count on? Losing hope is like deciding not to breath; deciding to just stop. So maybe my biggest fear is the loss of all hope.

The biggest part of hope, though, is believing in it. Everyone believes in someone or something at some point in time. Whether you believed a jolly man dressed in a full red jumpsuit with a big white beard and a hat named Santa would come down your chimney, or you believed she would give you the money she’s owed you for months back soon, or you believed him when he told you he’d never hit you again, you’ve believed in something. Belief is the biggest picture there is. It is under your control to believe in or not what will completely shape who you are in the future. “Believe it, achieve it.” Some people live by these words. They consider believing in something hard enough is the only thing you need to do in order to get what you want. Others contend this idea. If I believe I will win the lottery with all my heart, it doesn’t necessarily mean I will. It just means my mind tried. It tried so hard to convince myself and the world that because I believed I would get what I wanted, or maybe what I needed, I would. My life though follows the motto “believe it, achieve it.” The idea that if you believe you will achieve.

Believing manipulates trying to do your best; trying hard enough that one day you do; you do your best. And whatever that is that you are doing your best in, you couldn’t be doing it any better, so you are succeeding. You are achieving. So is my biggest fear then, believing in something, maybe someone, that no matter how much I believed, I couldn’t achieve?

What’s to come is scary to me, scary to most, actually. No amount of plans or schedules could organize you enough to actually know what the future holds. No one in the world could predict every decision you will make or every person that will go in or out of your life. There is not one person, place, or thing out there that knows what your future has coming for you. The only things we have to rely on are the trust we put in people and things, the hope we hold on to that what we put our trust in was the right choice not just this one time, but every time, and believing in ourselves enough for there to be another sunrise welcoming us to the world the next morning.
So, what if none of us believed. If we all lost hope. Didn’t trust a soul. Would we have a future? If so, would it be one worth living?