The Love And Hate Relationship Between Our Subjective Expectations And The Objective Reality

''Peace begins when expectation ends. '' -Sri Chinmoy

Have you ever had one of those spontaneous dates or trips?
The kind that come off to you by surprise, but end up being the very best of all?
Even though I love to plan my life, I’ve always been a huge lover of spontaneous things.
I mean, you don’t even have the time to build up any expectations, which is probably a big part as to why you end up having the most fun of all!

To make sense of life, we all tell ourselves stories internally.
And part of these stories consists in expecting certain things out of life, situations and people.
We know that lowering our expectations would certainly make us way happier, but it’s easier said than done.
Indeed, reality does not come with an instruction book, and each one of us chooses to envision life the way we want to.
Lowering our expectations does not mean that we no longer have goals and dreams we wish to strive for and that we suddenly become passive, it rather means that we have switched our perspective to one that allows anything to happen.

In that sense, acceptance becomes our best ally as we navigate through life.
I’m lucky enough that almost my whole life, I’ve taught myself to focus more on what I can give than what I can take from others.
That alone is a big game changer, because let’s face it, the biggest problems we encounter in life often have to do with other human beings. And unfortunately for us, others are not there to meet our every need.

We all have this view in our mind of how things should be, but we got to remember that this ''view'' is different for every single person we meet.
And so your idea of what entails this or that is different than somebody’s else idea of the same concept.
It is funny because we forget too often that the external world is seen solely through our own lenses, but it’s not because we see things a certain way that our reality is 100% accurate of how things really are.
We make life such a personal thing that when we are asked to state facts in an objective way, it can even be hard for us to do so, because we’re so used to put our own way of seeing things.
The same principle applies with life events.
I always say there’s three sides to a story: the first person’s part, the second person’s part and the third one being the truth.
It’s silly, but just that alone illustrates how as human beings, we interpret things and even mold them the way we want.
The way we recall a particular event as of now, does not coincide perfectly with the event that happened at the precise time it did.
Why?
Because the way we view it now is based on who we are now and the way which we see it now.
But let’s say the event happened two months ago. We were a different person then, and we were feeling different then too. And so you see that technically the same ''event'' that happened, becomes personalized through our way of seeing it.

Stephen Hawking said something very touching that relates to the power of expectations:
''My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.''
I think this is a great reminder to remain grateful of what we have.
Most of us would probably not be able to adopt this kind of mindset.

My favorite human and first person that comes to mind when I think of expectations is no other than Leo Buscaglia. He would say: ''We don’t love to be loved, we love to love. ''
And I think it holds so much wisdom, courage and purity.
I think that the moment we give someone anything, and expect something in return, our act of giving cancels itself out.
Last beautiful nugget of wisdom that comes from him:
''One cannot give what he does not possess. To give love you must possess love.
To love others, you must love yourself. ''
Once again, self-love is the safest foundation we can allow ourselves to stand on. 💖 ✩
One love to you all!!! 💚 💜 💚