Reserve Your Expectations
“Expect nothing, accept everything.”
I can't recall where I read that quote, but it was from a woman who had nothing to lose, as the article went. It's stuck with me ever since. Seems pretty simple, but every time I think about it, it makes so much sense.
If I don't have any expectations of my friends, or the people around me, or from life in general, I'm not going to be disappointed.
It seems like a sad way to live, not having any expectations, but if you have no expectations in the first place, well, nothing is going to surprise you.
I've always had the problem of having too many expectations; I tend to romanticise things in my head. By this I mean new experiences of which I have no previous information or experience of are seen through a movie-filter in my head, and I used to expect those events to turn out like the movies. Let's say I was in secondary school, and maybe my class was going on a field trip or having some sort of event that happened in teen movies and books—that was the lens I'd see it from, and I'd have the expectation that it would be like the movies. I'd have a great time with my friends, we'd laugh and get crushes, maybe someone would walk past me in slow motion, and we'd meet eyes and fall in love and stuff like that.
Of course, that never happened, and I was always left disappointed and underwhelmed at the end of everything. For one, none of those experiences happened to people who are introverted like I am and who don't talk that much if they're not in familiar company, like me. I was always partially on my own whenever my friends went off to do something that I couldn't follow them to do, and so I just sat there, not having fun and watching other people do things that weren't in the movies.
All of that is just to say; if I had tempered my expectations, or if I had not had any expectations at all, I might have had a lot more fun.
I might have gone into things with an open mind, and I might have enjoyed myself.
It's still a struggle not to have any expectations, but at least with few expectations instead of none at all, I'm not setting myself up to wanting something that might never happen.
It's also helped me with relating to other people. I have expectations that some things should be common sense, and it's easy for me to get annoyed when people don't act the way I would. It's not the best way to live life, and it assumes that everyone thinks like me, when they don't. I've learned to temper my expectations, although this is harder to do with people than with events, where I can somewhat control my thoughts.
I'm still a work in progress, although I hope one day I'll be able to be more tolerant, having zero expectations of anyone and thus not being disappointed with whatever they do or don't do.