H for homework

Suffering and pain is man’s reality.

If pain and suffering is inevitable in this world while we are still alive, then we as sentient and rational beings are bound to look for something to relieve us of that burden.

When Professor Motol asked the class to cite a quote from a movie that tells us something about our being man, ­ I immediately knew what movie to cite and discuss. Shawshank Redemption is about a prisoner named Andy Dufrense who made a friendship to a colored inmate named Red. The movie showed 20 years of Andy’s life inside the penitentiary and how he managed to get the most out of the cruelty and harshness of being incarcerated.

The line that I chose is that of Andy in a letter to Red, “Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

What Andy said is true. What is essentially good and real will never die. And being a human being, we are bound to hold on to hope and know that positive outcomes will rise from our sufferings and pain.

The ness of being a human being or a man is then his ability to hope for better things to happen despite experiencing suffering and pain. What makes man unique to other creatures on earth is his ability to hope.

We could also say that man is the only creature on earth that feels and understands what suffering and despair is. One could not hope if there are no sufferings or despair, like one could not know the color white if he doesn’t know black.

If one looks into the major religions of the world, a third of them teach the virtue of hope (virtue comes from the Latin word virtus, meaning strength, hoping then is the strength in all of us to endure and persevere through suffering, hope).

Judaism is still waiting for their messiah or Elijah to comeback and their waiting for their savior to come is hoping that despite the harshness of the world, they still know and look forward to be saved, thus hoping for better things to happen.
Buddhism has four noble truths. The first of the noble truths is Life means suffering. But the Buddha, or the enlightened one, doesn’t stop there. He states that suffering can end through enlightenment. The third noble truth shows us that Buddhism practices the virtue of hope: The cessation to suffering is ATTAINABLE. The Buddhists’ practice of the Eightfold Path is parallel to that of hoping. There wouldn’t be practitioners of Buddhism if they knew that there was no end to suffering, thus they are hoping that their suffering would cease and that they would reach the state called nirvana (Nirvana is enlightenment, this is the ultimate goal of Buddhists).
And then, there’s Christianity, we are taught that hope is a grace from God. I wouldn’t elaborate on the topic completely as this might pertain to digression.

The movie is considered to be one of the greatest movies of all time because of its content and message. What I wrote in this homework only touches little of what the movie is trying to say about the essence of man. To surmise what the movie is about and what I’m trying to say about hope, I’ll quote Andy again:
Get busy living, or get busy dying.
Andy chose the former and lived to see his hopes come to reality, we should do the same.