What Do You Think About Expectations?

I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations. Some people, whose ideas and thoughts on life I cherish (if not crave), suggest that expectations lead to resentments. Expect nothing and everything will mean something… I did a little bit of research about Buddhism, which posits this same concept of letting go of expectations in order to reduce our own suffering. Essentially, Buddhism proposes (because that’s what religion is to me, a proposal, but we can save that for another blog) that, “if we look at our life, very simply, we see that it is marked with frustration and pain. This is because we attempt to secure our relationship with the ‘world out there’ by solidifying our experiences in some concrete way. The problem is that the ‘world out there’ is constantly changing, everything is impermanent and it is impossible to make a permanent relationship with anything at all.” Makes sense… But this seems so obvious already to me. Yes, life, the world, our lives are constantly changing. If we expect anything to be consistent at all in this world it should be change. How twisted is that?

I am in no way, shape, or form suggesting that I know what Buddha was thinking, but I feel like, once again, us humans have put too much onto something that is really very simple. The point that I feel like he (or she) was trying to get across was this preceding fact: that change is inevitable and that clinging to negative emotions resulting from unexpected change is counterproductive. I mean, if we know life is always changing, why do we get so upset when something in our own individual life follows that same pattern? Let’s be honest, I have frequently had a pity party for myself when things didn’t go my way. My current problem is trying not to feel bad about feeling bad that things didn’t go my way… So basically, even though I know and accept that change is inevitable, I still feel sad sometimes. What is THAT about, right? Sometimes it’s just so hard to let go! I really wanted that and I put a shitload of work into it but I still didn’t get it so what the hell? I know it’s not the end of the world, I know that my state of upset is also temporary and that soon I will look back and think to myself, Damn, that sucked. Oh well, glad I made it to the other side. I know that life is just ups and downs. I know all that stuff. But I’m human. I’m not some enlightened monk who floats around letting the positives and negatives of life roll off her back like drops of rain, like nothing. I wouldn’t even want to not feel things… What is the point of being alive if we’re not feeling?

What if I do get what I expected from a situation or from a person? Is it ok for me to have positive feelings about that? Is it ok for me to feel love, joy, and excitement? Or am I still just setting myself up for failure? I feel. WE FEEL. That’s what we do. It seems to me that the sooner we embrace that fact rather than trying to figure out ways to avoid feeling, the sooner we can all just let each other be. Feelings can be just as temporary as life, if we learn to appreciate them as they come and then move on from them.

My questions to you, then, are as follows: What gets you through those times when someone or something doesn’t meet your expectations? What gets you through those times when YOU don’t meet your own expectations?