Pain of Expectations
Managing our expectations is a challenge. When we expect something good to happen, it’s easy to let things get out of control and go overboard with excitement. We might find that the prospect of good fortune comes our way, and the mere idea of it gets our minds racing. We start thinking about how good things are going to be, only for them not to come to fruition and for us to be disappointed.
This sort of experience can be painful. We might look back and find that we were over-zealous. In the future, we may take measures to prevent us from feeling that pain again. There are many different strategies for keeping our expectations in check, and we will find that they work with varying levels of effectiveness.
Lowering our expectations
One way to mitigate the pain of expectations is to lower them. We may expect that something good will happen to us, but we don’t want to be disappointed if it doesn’t come to fruition, so we temper our expectations. If we are feeling overoptimistic and we are worried about ending up disappointed, we can counteract it by taking a more pessimistic attitude. We can take time to think about why we should take a more cautioned approach.
Temporating our expectations when they don’t match reality is a reasonable approach, but often, we temper our expectations even when they do match reality. When a new opportunity comes up, we may downplay it to avoid disappointment. This prevents us from fully engaging with the world since we always fear encountering negative emotions.
Living without expectations
A simpler approach may seem to be to live life with no expectations. The pain of expectations is a result of life’s uncertainty. We expect things to happen, but the truth is that the future is uncertain. If we invest emotional energy into things that don’t pan out, it is a waste and leads to disappointment.
We may respond by going into our lives with no expectations. If we don’t expect anything in particular to happen, we aren’t hurt when things don’t go as planned. This acknowledges the fact that the future is uncertain. We just go where life takes us and don’t resist by holding onto expectations.
The issue is that this approach is insincere. While we can’t say with certainty what the future holds, some outcomes are more likely to happen than others. To say that we don’t know what’s going to happen misses the fact that we are able to plan. If the future were completely uncertain, plans wouldn’t work. Planning would be completely pointless. Without expectations, we would not know what is worth planning for, so there would be no use in preparing anything.
You may try to get around this fact by saying you can prepare for potential situations without expecting those situations actually to happen. The problem is you still have to judge what is likely to occur. Even if you prepare for “everything,” “everything” does not mean everything. Everything is based on what you think is likely to happen. Living life without expectations isn’t an option.
Adapting our expectations
Zen’s focus is on seeing things as they are. By “things,” we’re not just talking about the world around us; we’re also referring to the things in our mind. Fundamentally, the things in the world and the things in our mind are not separate. Zen is about finding harmony between what is going on in the world and what is going on in our mind. When we minimize our expectations, we fail to acknowledge the world, but when we try to have no expectations, we fail to acknowledge our mind. How should we handle expectations to keep these two forces in balance?
The fundamental problem with expectations isn’t with the expectations themselves but our failure to adapt them to the world. Usually, the world changes quicker than our expectations do. When we expect something that doesn’t happen, the disappointment is just a failure to adapt to our expectations at that moment. Our expectations are sticky and often don’t change with the world around us.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to lament the present because it failed to live up to the past. We don’t have to worry when we feel disappointed by missed expectations. We can just proceed accordingly. We don’t have to be taken prisoner by what we were expecting to happen. We are always already free of our past expectations and can always form new ones. This adaptability brings a sense of relief, knowing that we can adjust our expectations to the ever-changing world.
This is what it means to live in the present moment. The present is always already free from the past, so to live in the present means to be free from the past. When we see this, we can stop trying to mold our expectations to avoid pain in the future. If our expectations fail to come to fruition, we can handle it then; we don’t need to anticipate it. This freedom from past expectations allows us to fully embrace the present and the possibilities it holds.
Changing the world versus being changed by the world
Everyday Zen interestingly expresses this idea. They say, “Everyday Zen’s mission is to change and be changed by the world.” We all can relate to the idea of being on a mission to change the world. We all have ideas about how the world should be and how people should act, and we want people to act in accordance with our ideas. When the world does not align with those ideas, we often find it necessary to change the world to be in alignment. We all want to live in a world that is more like how we think it should be.
The idea of wanting to be changed by the world is more nebulous. We want to feel like we are in control. The last thing we want is to be influenced by things we can’t. We are so averse to being controlled that we often act against our interests to avoid it. If we are wrong, many of us will sooner make ourselves and those around us miserable than change our view about something; that is how averse we are to letting the world change us. This is why we should strive to be changed by the world.
We should keep this guidance in mind when setting expectations. Our expectations shape the world, and the world shapes our expectations. When these two aspects are balanced, there is harmony, but when one gets out of balance, that’s when we run into issues. This doesn’t require a ton of willful effort on our end. Our expectations naturally mold to the world around us. It’s when we don’t let them change that things get out of balance. If we make any effort at all, it should be to allow our expectations to shape the world around us. It’s better to live in harmony with the world than to fight it. If we need to change it, we should change it while in harmony with it.
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