Toxicology

"Alle Dinge sind Gift und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist."
"All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison."

-Paracelsus, father of toxicology

Hope is no different. In moderation hope it is a powerful panacea against the constant volleys of life's troubles. Hope can fight back tears. It can invigorate the heart with unjust fervor. In some situations, hope is capable of even pulling us back from the fingertips of death itself. A life without hope would almost certainly lead to an abrupt demise, perhaps at the hands of none-other than one's self.

Hope is also a poison. As Paracelsus realized long ago, too much of something is always toxic. The human body is little more than an elegant balance of biochemical reactions, each only a quantifiable distance from disastrous extremes. And even though hope itself is not widely recognized as a biological function (I would argue that it is), in reality it operates no differently. To gorge oneself on hope would be to live to upon the edge of a razor; sway too far in any direction and all is lost.

Acutely, hope leads to rash decisions. One might purchase a life's savings worth of lottery tickets on the merits of hope. Equally disastrous would be to forgo the most sensible of fleeting opportunities in search of a miracle. More often than not, however, hope is instead prone to display chronic symptoms. It incubates and breeds into the slow decay of one's self. One could perhaps describe hope on the mathematical terms of a function regressing to zero, slowly sapping life with every second that passes. As every day of life hangs and falls to back to the Earth, one draws closer to an empty and desolate future. As horrifying as the impatient dehydration of cholera or the insidious grip HIV, hope is a slow-rot of one's existence before his or her own eyes. For some the disease may pass, leaving the broken fragments of what once was a human being. For others, it will consume us whole.

I have consumed hope... we all have. But I consume it as rapidly and desperately as the air I breath. Now I find myself standing on the razor's edge, circling closer and to addiction with every day. The acute stages have come and gone, and every sunrise reminds of their scars. Opportunities lost, time gambled, emotions ablated. But there is still time left. Wounds may still heal. I can still hope.