PopcornJackTerry

I was going to write a blog about serious and important, as well as life and the choices we have to make, that was also going to serve as a shameless plug for my last book, in hopes to goose sales a little bit, but then a friend of mine (one whom has presumably not read the book) asked my opinion about expectations, and so I decided instead to revisit that chapter of the book instead as a way to address how I feel about expectations and to also serve as a shameless plug for my last book as well. And yes, I’m a big fan of run-on sentences. So here it is:
Expectation and Obligation

It is almost impossible to imagine living without a certain level of expectations. Some of the simplest things that we don’t even think about we make a decision based on expectation. It’s Friday night and you want to go to the movies. What are you going to see? Something that you expect to enjoy. Unless you’re a masochist, then you might pick something you expect to hate. Either way, there is an expectation at play here. After the movie when people ask you how it was, you’ll probably end up saying things like “Loved it. It was everything I expected it to be.” Or “Hated it. Not at all like I expected.” Even during the movie the phrase “Didn’t expect that to happen” might pop out of your mouth. You can see just how important expectations are to us.

To achieve a fanatical inner peace one of the things you would probably want to do would be to remove all expectations from your life. A lofty and noble goal to be sure, and if that is something you eventually achieve that will truly be wonderful, but let’s start with some baby steps here, okay? You can’t do anything about other people and expectations they may place on you, and it’s not the easiest (nor most practical) to stop having expectations of things outside of your control, like the movie, so when we talk about expectations and the need to stop having them, we are talking about the ones you place on yourself.

Recognizing these expectations, like everything else, takes time, practice, patience and forgiveness. Time to make it an organic part of who you are, practice in being able to let go of expectations, patience in understanding that it is not something that happens overnight, and forgiveness for when you get angry at yourself for not progressing as fast as you would like to. (In other words, you can’t have expectations about letting go of your expectations.) But the first step in letting go of them is understanding why they are a roadblock and how to recognize them when they sneak up on you.

An expectation is nothing more than an unsubstantiated opinion of what you believe is going to happen, and they become most treacherous when you begin to have them about how it is you should be living. The expectations that you put on yourself are the ones you will never live up to. By having an expectation of what it is you are going to do, it keeps it always in your consciousness, and everything you do is measured against if you are living up to it. You end up constantly focused on this mental scoreboard and it keeps you from living in the moment and experiencing what is really happening. I didn’t expect to quit smoking, and I didn’t have an expectation of what it would be like. Sure I had heard plenty of stories about how tough it was, and most people who found out that I had quit were not shy about telling me what a challenge I was in for, but I knew that I was the one quitting at this moment in my life, and that had never happened before, so how could I have any expectations as to what it would be like? Without the expectation that most people think you should have—“This is going to be really hard.  I hope I can do this.  What do I do when I get my cravings?”—I removed any of that outside pressure. It was just me and my desire to quit.

It is just as important to have acceptance of ourselves as it is to reject expectations of what is going to happen. Acceptance is present. It concerns the here and the now and is the base from where we grow. Expectation is future, and since none of us have created time travel yet, there is no way to know what the future holds, so stop trying to predict it and then living up to it. In reading this book, you probably have expectations about how this book is going to help you. You expect this book to make you, in some way, a better person. But if you are constantly holding on to that expectation, you will always be living in the future and not in the present where you can actually be doing the work that will make you a better person.

In the end it’s a fine line, and basically a matter of semantics between the words “want” and “expect”. You want to improve your life, that’s why you’re here, and in wanting to do something you give yourself the energy to go forward, do the work and make the improvements that you are looking for. In expecting to improve your life, you have already put yourself mentally at the finish line, one that doesn’t actually exist. Expectation creates a finality that does not exist in life. Going back to the movie again, you can expect a happy ending in it, because the movie eventually ends. The credits roll, the lights come up and you go home. In the real world, life keeps happening. There is no moment where it all comes to an end. (Well, there is one moment, but at that point, I don’t think you’ll be worried about expectations.) Yes it is important that you stop and check in with yourself every so often, but that is to see where you are at, and not where you expect to be in the future.

Obligations are a lot like expectations in the sense that they are all but impossible to get away from. You have an obligation to go to work, to spend the holidays with your in-laws, to not punch the person in line in front of you who is taking waaaaaaaaay more time than any one person should ordering their food at McDonald’s (even though you may feel like you’d be doing the world a favor.) And so, like expectation, we need to remove that word from your vocabulary when dealing with the one thing you can control: yourself.

Obligation is just another word that has taken on more weight than it deserves, and it is now hard to think of the word without also feeling the negative connotations that come with it. There are two kinds of obligations that we have to deal with, active ones, where we have a commitment to someone or something already stated that we need to fulfill, and passive ones, where we feel a need to fulfill a promise that has not been made. A simple example of the difference is a phone call. You told your spouse you would call them when you got to wherever you were headed (active) versus a friend calls and leaves a message, doesn’t say anything about you needing to call back, but you feel like you should anyway (passive). Both of them are so much easier and less stressful to deal with when you stop thinking about them as obligations. We’ll start with the active one first.

You’ve driven six hours to get to wherever it is you need to be. Maybe it’s been a hellacious drive, loaded with traffic, construction and bad weather. You’re stressed out and all you want to do when you get out of the car is relax. Or maybe the minute you get there your best friend puts a drink in your hand and tells you some wonderful news and you just want to celebrate. Or your boss meets you and takes you to dinner with the very important client you’ve been brought in to impress. In the middle of whatever it is you think “Oh man, I have to call my spouse.” (And if you have to do something, it’s just another way of saying you are obliged to do something.) You think about it in terms like that, as an additional layer to everything else that is going on, and it creates stress and confusion and worry about what is important and what you are doing next, but if you look at it a different way, it’s the simplest thing to deal with.

When you over think something, that is when it takes on a life of its own inside our heads. You don’t think of every little thing you do when you check into a hotel. You don’t stop at the door to your room and say “Okay, first I’m going to turn on the light, then put down my bag, then go to the bathroom, then take off my shoes, then turn on the televisions, then, then, etc., etc., etc.” (At least I hope you don’t.) You simply just do all that stuff. The phone call is no different. You simply make it. You’re not obliged to do it, just like you know you’re not obliged to take off your shoes. You just know it’s something you’re going to do.

It’s the same with the passive obligation. Your friend calls, leaves a message, says “goodbye”, and you sit there and think, “Oh man, I have to call him back.” And you start thinking about it. Should you call him back now? Should you wait until later? Did they sound like it was important? Do you have time to talk right now? Here’s an easier question to ask yourself:

Do you want to talk to them right now? If yes, dial their number, if not, don’t. It’s as simple as that. And even if they said in the message “Hey call me back” you can still ask yourself the same question, because you are under no obligation (there’s that word again) to drop what you’re doing and call them.

Now both of these examples have an element I didn’t take into account and that is the element of emotional connectedness, but in both cases it would only serve to further separate your action from considering it an obligation. If you had a hellacious drive, or good news to share, or an important event was about to happen, I would think you would want to call your spouse (you know, the whole other half of the love you until death do you part thing) for comfort, for elation or for support. Likewise if a friend leaves a message, someone you care about, you are probably more genuinely interested in calling them back, whether they asked you to or not, than you would some stranger trying to sell you vinyl siding.

Obligation is nothing more than unnecessary weight put on something we already want to do, or at least accept that we have to. We may not want to go to work, but we know that we have to, so it is best just to accept that and move on, and not gnash our teeth and shake our fist at the sky, cursing our employment. If you remove that emotional/mental weight from it, you will find it might actually be more enjoyable than you thought. It’s no different then when a person loses physical weight, how much better they feel, not just physically, but emotionally as well. To begin making it part of who you are, start with the simplest things, the things in your own personal life. You’re not obliged to tell your spouse you love them; you tell them because you feel it. You’re not obliged to rake the leaves; you do it because the sense of pride it gives you to see how well you take care of your space. You’re not obliged to move on to the next part of this book, the part where I tell you just how I came to start this journey; you do it because you want to.

And if you want to read the next part of the book, all you need to do is click here.