The chewy quality of hope

Have you ever had chewing gum stick to your shoes? Did you try to remove it and when you did it became longer, stringier but still stuck? Have you ever tried to remove chewing gum from someone's hair and when you did the person screeched with pain and pleaded for you to leave it in, pleading it would come out eventually anyway? And have you noticed that there are black spots on most pavements and on the ground of train stations and other waiting spaces? Old chewing gum most of it.
Seems to me hope is a bit like chewing gum.
When fresh it's bursting with flavour, texture and possibilities but after having been chomped about for awhile your jaws are tired, the flavour gone and although the texture is perfect for blowing bubbles, basically your'e just going through the motions.
It has been suggested by many that without hope, mankind dwells carelessly and without purpose.
So what is hope and how is it different from expectation? Let's ask Collins (dictionary/thesaurus).
Hope= to desire and expect, to have belief/faith in; expectation=hopeful anticipation of desired event, prediction, assumption, surmise.
Do you hope for the train to arrive on time or do you expect? Do you hope for the sun to come up every morning or do you expect it to? Do you hope for other drivers to follow traffic rules or do you expect them to? Do you hope for friends to be loyal or do you expect it of them? And what about ourselves, do we hope for as little as possible pain and suffering in our own and loved ones lives, or do we expect it? (Ofcourse, it is very possible to both hope and expect at the same time. We can be expecting A to happen while we still hope for B.)
We hope to win the lottery because expecting to do so seems a bit far fetched(unless ofcourse you bought every ticket). Perhaps when we expect an outcome, we think we play a part in it, we have some perceived rights vested in the result.
Now hope on the other hand can contain a paradox; let's say we are told by our doctor what to expect and the prognosis we are given, not good, yet we may still hope for a different outcome in direct opposition to the expectations we were told to have. Hope looks at the hopeless and says; don't give up. Hope whispers: keep searching. Hope encourages: you can do it, just believe it. Hope leads: you haven't tried this, that, those, etc. before. Hope includes in it's vocabulary: maybe, perhaps, possible, potentially, plausible, could be, wait and see, and many more similar words.
Like the gum stuck to the shoe, hope sticks, it adapts. So you didn't win the lottery, but will you still buy another ticket? My guess is that you will. So your friend let you down, will you give him/her another chance? Your child messed up, will you forgive? Your team lost, will you quit on them?
Hope, like chewing gum "stretches" with our pulling. When we expect an outcome on the other hand, we often find it harder to be lenient, and the words "should/ought to" hiding somewhere in the recesses of our minds.
Once what we are" hoping for" has been transformed into what we are "expecting" then the only acceptable outcomes are the ones we deem "right". (The "black spots" on the pavement can be likened to unfullfilled expectations, rejected and spat out; ie the gum/hope has lost it's flavour and function.)
Hope like chewinggum can also be used as a sort of "glue". Dreams and realities can be held together with hope, so can darkness and light, despair and joy, suffering and contentment.

I heard someone say: "Hope is dangerous" but I dispute that, I believe that having no hope is very dangerous. Maybe you feel like your "gum" has lost all it's flavour and feel ready to spit it out, but let me offer an alternative. Get a new gum .......

While there is life there is hope--and while there is hope there is life.
(E. E. HOLMES, Joyful Through Hope)