Among the OED’s definitions of hope is “an island amid a fen-like wasteland”—hopelessness can also be such a refuge, a protected island inside a sea of possibilities and consequent failures. Biogeographers have learned that an island’s size determines its inhabitants both in number and in kind, that its distance from another land mass influences the rapidity of its evolution. In a nearly identical manner, the size of a despair tells us what might transpire inside its boundaries, and the distance a hope lies from other places hints of its homogeneity. No wonder, then, that family and network prove so important, for every connection lessens the chances of internal extinctions.

But hope and despair, by definition, are disconnections, islets inside each island of man, measured by their distance from the mainland of common life. There are despairs like New Zealand, separated by rising waters from what was once their mainland, still bearing remnant species of what was; hopes like Hawaii, erupting anew and blankly, developing life only through chance migrations. Each ecosystem grows according to what was given at birth and what happens by, and rarely seeing two alike, we can compare but not quantify them—the lonely teenager’s despair and the holocaust victim’s are but different, even though the one dwarfs the other in scale.

Instead, perspective decides how we experience our islands—inside we can either be secure or trapped, outside we can be vulnerable or free. We want into a group, out of a family, off a job, on a bandwagon, to belong, to be exiled, to just be left alone. If like Prince Siddhartha we live hopeful, protected lives and suddenly see disease, death and sadness, we may despair; if when despairing joy surprises us, we may suddenly hope. Unaware of this possibility for instant change, we can be secure, but once we experience the world shift we no longer can—unless we vilify our original perspective, like the convert who becomes more avid in belief than the churchgoers whom he joins.

To be inside a thing is to be secure—if one wishes to avoid the outside. A German friend, barely old enough to join the Hitler youth just as WWII ended, recounts having a fear so great during a bombing raid that he sought shelter in a squirrel hole, believing momentarily he could fit inside. All one has to do to feel secure is to sufficiently believe.

Hopelessness, on the other hand, is at once an area too small and one too large, is simultaneously confinement and exposure—if inside, we cannot get out; if outside, we cannot get in. It is a way of seeing, a manner of being, of not wanting to exist where we are, of being unable to be elsewhere, an overarching method by which to experience the world. The deep despairer witnesses in every hopeful thought or act the possibility of despair, feels its intensity measured in the distance between what might have been and what is. Hope, in such instance, is less the savior than the perpetrator, a reminder of the lost and the failed.

Despair is hope. We cannot despair if we do not hope—desire a change for the seemingly better. And we cannot hope if in fact despair is not at our heels. The hopeful and the hopeless share the same space, breathe the same air, each denying the alternative perspective. Hope, despair—birth sacs, both, securely sealing us from the outside.