Expectations are a funny thing, how they shape our lives like the canyon walls shape the course and direction of the river flowing through it.
One of the most powerful memories from my childhood is the morning I found the nearly full tub of popcorn on the counter. I was five years old, and the night before my mom had taken all of us (me, my brothers, and Judy's two kids) to the local drive-in. By intermission everyone was asleep, except for me, and since I was only five, I was tired too! But I was sitting "shotgun," so my mom tried to "bribe" me to stay awake with her for the second movie by buying the tub of popcorn during intermission. And apparently I had fallen asleep pretty quickly, because I found that tub of popcorn on the counter the next morning with only a small indent of popcorn I had eaten before falling asleep.
That tub of popcorn (to my five year old self) represented just how desperately and miserably I had failed and disappointed my mom, so I sat up on that counter top sobbing for more than 45 minutes with some of the deepest grief of my life. For me, it is one of the quintessential self-defining moments. My mom, on the other hand, never said a word to me about it, and probably never thought twice about how her five year old had fallen asleep at the drive-in. But I was the kind of kid who all you had to do was look at me funny and I modified my behavior, so to find that tub of popcorn after my mom had bought it specifically for me? So that I would stay awake with her? Yeah, I had definitely let my mom down. . . .and here was the giant tub of evidence to prove it.
When expectations exceed reality, disappointment inevitably sinks in.
At five, I didn't really disappoint my mom as much as I had disappointed that internalized self-expectation that I had created for and about myself, that set of "great expectations" that shaped the canyon walls of my own life journey. In a perfect world I would have been able to tell my mom how I had felt, and she would have "corrected" these skewed expectations before I had permanently internalized them. . . .but I didn't grow up in a perfect world. And we don't know (as children) that we are internalizing skewed and unrealistic expectations about our selves, so it can sometimes take an entire life time for the river to erode enough of the sediments of time and experience to expose these expectations for what they are, and how they have not only defined but limited the course and direction of a life.
But internalized expectations aren't always expectations of greatness and the resultant disappointment, as the shadow set of expections that children can internalize are the expectations of failure. And these expectations hold the power to make us feel like no matter what we do, or how well we may actually do it, we will never, ever, be good enough. This set of expectations is not the expectations of greatness to which we aspire, but the expectations that we do everything within our power to avoid. This is the set of expectations I find myself unexpectedly working through now, because I am confronted (both day and night) with how I am perceiving and anticipating other people's response to my return to work after a leave of absence that leaves even me questioning my place in the world.
The only expectations that really matter are the ones that we have internalized about our self, because these are the ones that we take with us no matter where the journey flows.
There are some who do not survive the river, but rather succomb to its unrelenting force against the canyon walls, and I often wonder if this isn't what happened to my mom, but there is no way to know, for sure. But one thing is certain, and that is that you can't always tell by looking from the outside what a person is experiencing on the inside.
I have a friend who believes that we invite into our life exactly what we don't want, if that is what we remain focused on. So, is this what I'm doing? Is my focus on not disappointing people and not failing shaping the way other people are responding to me? I wonder how my experience would be different if I could just "go with the flow" like John Wesley Powell, with no expectation of the journey or the destination, to let go of the need to control this outcome and just let the river carve the canyon.