A comprehensive study that yielded an integrated model would require inventories (such as Gwinn and Hellman have produced), along with analytic studies of societal priorities (e.g. percentage of income devoted to financial, educational or relational investments), review of public documents (such as novels, critical essays and even poetry) that concerns hopes and the future, along with personal interviews and collective interviews (using social technologies such as focus groups, world cafés or open spaces).
If we are to appreciate the way(s) in which Hope fills in nothingness and the Void of helplessness and despair, then we will need this type of integrative study. Without such a study, we are collectively vulnerable to the mixture of negative emotions identified in the first third of this essay.
Conclusions
These then are some of the dynamics associated with emotions evolving from our confrontation with nothingness. I have concluded this essay by focusing on that remarkable and often elusive emotion called Hope. It is when motivated by Hope that we build an image of the future out of the state of nothingness. It is out of the Void that we create the substance of a dream. It is with Hope that we discover the potential of matching a challenge with sufficient support. We are hopeful that we are not left handing on a cliff in the Cascades, nor spending hours in a boring meeting about system reform. We Hope for the threshold of Flow and take steps to enter this threshold.
As repeatedly noted, without finding or creating Hope, we are left in a state of helplessness. We act impulsively, without direction. Or, more often, we do not act at all. We remain Frozen in place. It is to this state that I turn in the third essay in this series.
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