I didn’t have a TV in college. When the baseball playoffs started my roommate and I went to the dorm lobby to watch a game. A few feet from us was the biggest person I’d ever seen. He was 6’8” tall, weighed 280 pounds, and was a freshman football player. He barely fit in the arm chair he was using. All of a sudden three more freshman football players came up from behind him. One pinned down each arm of his arms. The third continually punched his arm for about five seconds before they all let go and ran for their lives! Of course he got up and gave chase. My roommate and I watched the whole thing. Then he turned and looked at me in amazement. I shrugged my shoulders and said, “What did you expect?” They were freshmen and school had only been in session a couple weeks. To expect different behavior from them at that point in their lives didn’t seem reasonable.
A lot of my life I lived in a dream world/nightmare that revolved around unrealistic expectations. The world goes around the sun and the only person I control is myself. It’s not someone else’s purpose to agree with me or be who I think they should be. I had an entitlement mindset. No wonder I was often disappointed and frustrated.
I decided to take a closer look at my expectations about life. I found that most of them weren’t expectations at all. They were really wants, desires, demands, and judgements of how I thought the world should be. In his book, A New Earth, Eckharte Tolle says, “Now you can enjoy and honor the things of this world without giving them an importance and significance they don’t have. You can participate in the dance of creation and be active without attachment to outcome and without placing unreasonable demands upon the world: Fulfill me, make me happy, make me feel safe, tell me who I am. The world cannot give you those things, and when you no longer have such expectations, all self-created suffering comes to an end.”
The Stoic philosopher Seneca put it this way. “Fortune doesn’t have the long reach we suppose, she can only lay siege to those who hold her tight.”
I like his use of the word siege. It brings to mind prolonged suffering that arises when I cling to an expectation. I told my daughters as they were growing up, “It’s okay to be disappointed. Just don’t let it last too long.” In other words don’t let the unfulfilled wants of life lay siege to your happiness.
Now I cling tightly to a quote by Theodore Roosevelt rather than the prospect that fortune will go my way. “Comparison is the thief of joy.” My greatest expectation is that I will take the bumps of life in stride. That allows me to navigate situations as they are, rather than comparing them to the way I would like them to be. Nothing more complicated than perception
May you have enough today, one moment at a time.
Let your vagus nerve help.
THIS HELPED ME 