Everyday Musings > Great Expectations

Frederick E. Perl once said "I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful."

I once narrated this to a friend of mine and received a lecture on 'this is not a perfect world and we don't live with perfect people, that expectations are a way of being, and that you can't help expecting things from people'.

Keeping that in mind, I set out to see if there are any real expectations, necessary ones that cannot be questioned. My friend Shilpa had sent me a link on Jean Leidloff's book Continuum Concept. And I found my answer there. "Expectation... is founded as deeply in man as his very design. His lungs not only have, but can be said to be, an expectation of air, his eyes are an expectation of light..."

Beautifully said, and I wholeheartedly agree. These are vital expectations. Without which the body cannot function. Everything else, if we're really honest to ourselves, we can live without. We only kid ourselves in thinking we'd die if that expectation is not met.

Expectation is a dictator. And it makes you run your life with an iron hand. 'I wanted', 'I thought', 'why didn't you', 'how could you' etc. These are the ones that get expressed. But there are those, that do far more harm, that never get spoken of. They dwell in our mind – the shhh...Silent expectations. Ideas of right and wrong that get built up over the years and you don't even realise that it's there, infesting your thoughts.

Was chatting with a friend on why he kept turning down all the marriage proposals that came to him. He said that none of them were his type. Expectations. He had a pre-set frame of reference, and whoever the girl it was that he would marry had to fit into it. The reason why no one ever did. No one ever could. It was too strict and definite an expectation, not allowing him to see what the girl had, but what she should have. So it was about looking for what's missing instead of what's there. And that's just the tip of the expectation iceberg. Say he finds 'the girl', he would have then have silent expectations from his marriage, and if it turned out different from the frame in his head, it would lead to disappointment.

Expectation arises from two things. Firstly from the past, that is to say, 'something happened then, and now it shouldn't, or should'. Like you best friend let you down, and now you expect an insane amount of commitment from every friend you make. Or you stop being friends with them. Secondly, from the future, from already having lived your life in your head, that 'this is the way things ought to be'. Like you make a new friend, imagine your life, happy forever, doing everything together, a friend who'd die for you, and then the next day, you ask him out for a movie, and he says he's busy and you feel extremely cheated and hurt.

For the fortunate beings who live in the present, in the now, there are no expectations, except the vital ones that keep them alive and going, and are immediate to the task at hand. And those are indeed the greatest ones.