The Art of Expecting Everything Else

Awareness comes first when one wishes to make a change.

What follows is action, yet no wish alone can grant us easy access to those steps.

We are imperfect by nature, which is why it’s so easy to fall back into old habitual patterns. The unfairness lies in believing we should succeed simply because we have decided to try. That belief breeds disappointment before we have even begun.

Breaking news: it’s rare for the second, third, or even fourth attempt to lead to success.

When I first realised that expectations were the greatest source of my disappointments, I was in Sri Lanka. I had many expectations of life, yet a gradual equation that seemed to define the rest stood out.

Ask yourself, what kind of a life do you want to live?

More often than not, one expects to live a happy life.

But doesn’t that make every moment we are not happy feel like a disappointment?

It is the pursuit of a happy life that makes one feel dissatisfied with their life.

When I cracked this, major bricks shifted in my life. I began to see happiness not as an end game but as an aid along the way, filling me with pleasance as I walked the path I was destined to take.

“To live is to suffer; to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering,” said Nietzsche.

Without, discomfort, suffering and stillness, the moments of joy would feel indifferent. If we were happy all the time, we would not know what happiness meant.

Even so, it is easier said than done, and as a person with a scattered mind, I can easily fall back into old patterns.

Yesterday, I experienced a moment of truth when I woke up and saw a birthday message from my sister, the one I haven’t spoken to in over two months. While I kept telling both myself and others that she was no longer in my life and that I didn’t care, in truth, I was the one who cared. She was the one who did not.

I deceived myself with anger, but I now see how strong the hopes I had built in my mind were.

I expected my sister would call, thinking she waited for that special day I was born to bury the hatchet and make amends.

She didn’t.

I didn’t want to wake up in tears on my birthday.

I did.

When I saw the message she sent, carrying a sincerity as if it was written to our next-door neighbour, the disappointment finally made sense.

She was not the source of my disappointment. I was. Nurturing my expectations in secrecy, I realised that what I had been projecting onto her were my own beliefs.

Rejection had always been a trigger for me, a childhood wound buried deep. When the very person I had admired all my life wore that same mask, I felt a dagger pierce my heart, and I ended up in tears within the first two minutes of opening my eyes on my birthday.

When I was little, I wanted to be her when I grew up. She was the core of my admiration, maybe even the beginning of my writing and creativity. It was her dream to become a writer when I was little, and I adopted that dream as I adopted everything else she was.

As we grew up, she often told me she didn’t know what she would do without me. I was her rock, and she was mine or so I thought.

But family is not always what you imagine it to be, and that is okay. There’s nothing to do but accept and live with whatever remains.

With all there is and all there was, yesterday did not end up being a happy birthday for me. I carried sorrow and grief, facing the truth I had kept myself from thinking: my sister didn’t care about me.

For me, this wasn’t a lost battle. It was a quiet victory, not towards my sister, but towards myself. Although this experience shadowed my entire birthday, keeping me in low spirits, I unmasked my sneakiest enemy: expectations hiding beneath anger, disguised as hope.

With all there is and all there was, life rarely turns out the way one expects.

If you’re going to have an expectation, expect everything else but that from life, and somehow, that will set you free.

A way to live a happy life is to not expect it to be one.

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