Expectations
On our drive home from New Mexico over the holiday break, I purposed to keep empty hands and a wandering mind while my husband drove. This practice was inspired by the book I was reading at the time called A Minute to Think by Juliet Funt. I tend to be a constant doer and felt her invitation to make space for sitting, thinking, and mental wandering. As thoughts came in and out of my mind, they started to loop around to a feeling of heaviness I had experienced over the break, a feeling that had been building for months. The thoughts continued to come into focus and then drift out. All the while, I looked out the window at the yellow grass and the brown lumps of scratchy bushes scattered across the land, seemingly planted in equal distance from each other. The mountains rose from the horizon in the distance. I gazed and I thought, and I wondered. As I examined the unique landscape of east New Mexico--it’s simplicity, it’s barrenness, and it’s rustic beauty—and I began to have clarity about the culprit of my heaviness of soul. Unmet expectations were going to be the death of me.
Why did I seem pretty good at letting other people’s expectations of me go, but had such a hard time letting go of expectations I have of others? As a pastor’s wife, I feel like I came into the role with my proverbial boxing gloves up, ready to defend my choices and actions. I wrongly assumed I would have a crowd of people ready with criticism of the ways that I wasn’t doing or being the right thing. I don’t know exactly where I got those ideas, but never once have I felt the need to do so. But on the flip side, I have kept the expectations I have of others stacked up like hay bales to the brim of a barn. I had collected so many unmet expectations in nearly every domain of life and there wasn’t much room to stack anymore. They felt like dead weight the longer they have stayed. It was making it harder and harder to feel light and free and hopeful.
I decided I needed some help deciphering how to lose these extra pounds in my soul. I broke from my “non-doing” fast and got on the google machine and started doing some research on expectations. Is it possible to live with only appropriate expectations? How does one know which are appropriate and which are not, and how does one release the rest?
Some questions that helped untangle my thoughts:
*Where my expectations verbalized? In nearly all cases, no.
*In the few situations that they were verbalized, were they agreed upon? Um, no.
*Are they realistic? If I try to empathetically sit in their driver’s seat and see through their windshield of life, then the answer is no. My expectations weren’t realistic. No one can really know what it’s like to look through someone else’s windshield of perspective. But to the best of my ability, I used the information I have about people I know and love, and imprints that likely influence how they see the world. My attempt to put my point of view in the backseat and be empathetic to theirs was life-giving. Looking at my expectations that way, most seem ridiculous and are only connected to how I have seen and experienced life. They are not connected at all to how they see life, experience it, or how they behave. How would they know to act that way or say that thing? Why would they want to act in the way I want them to? They just wouldn’t. There is also the underlying false assumption that the way I view the situation is most certainly the superior way to view it. As my counselor reminds me to remind myself: “I know a way, not necessarily the way.”
The absurdity of the hours I have invested in thinking, stewing, crying, moaning and groaning over these unmet expectations is embarrassing. After assessing the hilarity of it, I feel hopeful that they are evaporating. It has been like deciding to get up off the bench at a train station for the train that very likely may never come. In the meantime, my dogmatic commitment to the one train I was expecting caused me to neglect countless other trains, full of opportunities and people coming and going that could’ve offered fruitful interactions. But I insisted on waiting for that one. I’m done waiting. I say that not in a huffy, resentful way. I say it with a sigh of relief for myself, and the freedom that releases toward countless others unbeknownst to them. They didn’t know that they had expectations resting on them. It’s a reset for all. I stand up from the bench, and step into a new pattern. I have agency. I have options. I don’t have to get stuck at the train station anymore.
I summarized my research on the topic of unmet expectations into two simple responses as I go forward in this new practice. The first is to subtract the expectation from the reality of the situation, and accept in gratitude what “is.” I release the “are not’s,” and turned my attention to “the things that are.” In each of the situations I examined, there wasn’t just one or two things to be thankful for. There were many. What surprised me was that those were there the whole time but because my vision was laser focused on what is not, I couldn’t see the things to be grateful for.
Another thing I can do it is take action. I can take responsibility for what is mine to do, and leave the rest. Quit waiting for the train. Be responsible in the present instead of playing chess with all the things that could be. This phrase can be released from my vocabulary like a helium balloon being released to the sky: “If they would only . . .” Share the expectations if it is appropriate to do so. Without sharing them, they certainly cannot be agreed upon. Sharing them also seems to take them through a reality filter. For example, I can think a lot of things in my head, and write elaborate stories about what could be. However, if I had to verbalize expectations to a person, I think I would bend them toward reality rather than the augmented things they become in my head, before they get stacked in my proverbial “barn.”
I feel 20 lbs. lighter. This year has felt more joyful because the haze and fog of clouded vision that I had been looking at many of my relationships through is gone. I can see things more as they are—the good that is there, untainted by the things that are not. It’s good to reset, to clean out the barn and to not play imaginary chess anymore. Who knows what productive things I may do with the mental energy not going toward collecting those anymore? The hay barn is empty, and life is too short to keep waiting on those same trains.
