Hope feeds us. Nurtures us. When we live hopefully, we live expectantly. We don't know what is going to happen, but that doesn't stop us from expecting things to happen.

Hopeful people are always looking, ready, waiting, expecting. Each morning is like an Easter egg hunt. Things might look normal and mundane, but someone has tucked and hidden beautiful things under and around obvious and everyday places. Sometimes the beautiful thing is tucked under tragedy and suffering.

Hope is sometimes a gift. Sometimes it just happens. It opens inside us and around us like a rose's bloom in time-lapse photography. We feel it, and are thankful for it.

Other times hope is a discipline, which is to say a choice. I don't mean the childish folly of "Everything will be OK," because everything is not OK and some things will never be OK. No, hope as discipline is the decision to move forward expectantly even and after our worst fears are realized. The risk of hope is the willingness to look even into devastation for the possibility of meaning and new life -- a life worth living.

Despair is a kind of grief. Specifically, despair is the name of the sorrow that results from the loss of hope. Hopelessness is a profound loss indeed, perhaps a human being's most terrifying and painful loss. Yet, ironically, most hopeless people don't feel hopeless; they behave hopelessly. Their despair isn't apparent to them as despair; their behavior despairs. They live their lives just the other side of "Que sera, sera." It's more like: so life stinks and then you die, and I no longer give a tinker's damn. Let's party.

In the Stephen King short story "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," protagonists Andy and Red are prison inmates and fast friends. Yet the harshest words they ever exchange are over a disagreement about hope.

"Hope is a dangerous thing in here," Red says venomously.

"You're wrong about hope," Andy insists. "Hope is a good thing, one of life's best things."

Red storms away from the table.

But Red is not despairing. His hostility toward hope reveals its beckoning presence. And Red is correct. Hope is dangerous. While hope opens us to life's richest experiences, it also makes us most vulnerable to being made a fool. The human ego reacts badly to shattered hope.

So Red is clinging desperately to the ego's remedy for both despair and hope -- cynicism. And as bad as cynicism feels, and as dull and boring as it makes us, we experience it as a victory over foolishness. We're back in charge. In charge of what, exactly, I'm not sure. Our own defiant emptiness?

The doctor tells the man he has cancer. How serious, we don't yet know. Time for tests. Time to sit around and pretend things are normal while somebody in a lab decides whether he's dying. "We'll have these test results back in about a week," the nurse says. "No problem," thinks the man. "I'll just be at home ... waiting."

But he isn't just home waiting. He goes home to smoke all the more. Smoke like a fiend. He'll show those doctors who's boss. He'll be damned before he'll be foolish enough to hope for a cure. To hope for life. To hope for meaning even if there is no cure. To hope.

There is a new pseudo-spirituality out there, which goes something like this: Don't burden people with your expectations of them. Don't get invested in any particular outcome. "I don't expect anything," says one such guru, "that way I'm never disappointed."

Well, it appears some of us will remain spiritually unenlightened. Most married people, for example, hope and expect their spouse will endure, will not discard them, will not lie to them or betray them in adultery. Furthermore, to be married is to have a deep investment in those particular outcomes.

If I ever tell you that I have no expectations of you, it won't be a compliment. It will mean that I'm done. Through. Divested.

People in therapy often ask, "Is there any hope?"

The fact that you made this appointment is evidence of hope. The fact that you're still asking that question.

Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Clear View Counseling and Wellness Center in Las Vegas. Contact him at skalas@reviewjournal.com.