Great Expectations
What drives humans to go beyond themselves to achieve greatness? Is Excellence an individual choice or collective expectation? How capable are humans to identify and respond differently when faced with the same emotion?
If you are in my generation, you would perhaps be confounded with the duality of existence. We grew up learning to respond to certain situations differently and years later the same event demands a completely shifted behaviour. With communication still in its nascent stage, families never had the option of being anxious about the whereabouts of their kith and kin till at least a month went past for the next snail mail to arrive. Patience was not a virtue we needed to build, it was the norm, infused by the environment. We had very minimal expectations. Cut to 21st century and we don’t just fret, but quite literally panic when the person we dial up has not answered despite 5 rings going through! ( Is he in some kind of distress?)….WhatsApp sent…only one tick…(has he lost his phone?) ..email sent ..no reply since an hour…(well, I am just not important enough to him anymore).
The way our emotions spike and oscillate between caring for a loved one to lack of self worth, is not alien to us. As I wonder what brought us to this inexplicable need for external approval, I am curious to analyse if it has anything to do with “Expectations”.
Expectations , by definition to me, is the secure sense of feeling that one rests on due to the predictability of an outcome. In that respect, it is more of an emotion, an abstract. Once we connect feelings to any idea, we are bound to experience happiness, hurt, thrill, sadness, excitement and disbelief with equal measure. For some odd reason, in today’s world, we are surrounded by make believe rosy pictures of happiness that seem to paint the imagery of our expectations. You can find countless stories of people enjoying the first drops of rain, being grateful for a hot meal, thanking their ancestors for long flowing hair even! But where are the stories about how you goofed up big time? The time you lied, the event that you were the cause of someone’s hurt ? The anecdotes of how you broke the law( and not just about jumping past college gates beyond curfew time), how you have been a lesser being. The images of your not so prim and proper self, or even your messy room!
What is it that we have expectations around? When we call friends over for a cup of tea, what drives us to clean the dust off the table? Why have we become the kind of friends who make people dust their tables before being invited for that cup of tea? Wasn’t the conversation supposed to be more valuable than the ‘experience’? I can’t ascertain where it all starts, but surely seems to be in a flow all around. Is it the movies, the photoshop enhanced pictures of perfect rooms, the booming industry of designing perfect looking homes? It is almost as if there is this unsaid wave of expectations that one has to meet, to “fit in”.
How do you feel when you are not privy to a life changing event of a close friend? Years before, people would have “understood” that the other person would have had something on hand to attend to and hence could not inform on time. Technology managed to solve the problem of connectivity , so that nobody gets missed out. But how do you solve for a problem on prioritisation connected to affection or even respect!? Too often people define their sense of closeness in a relationship by the number of secrets they share and the blind demand that they are the “first- ones -to-know” about everything and anything in the lives of the other. In fact entire marriages can be seen to be based on this principle. This kind of expectation speaks to me about a lack of trust and perhaps even an inhibiting factor in the personal growth of individuals. Relationships thrive when there is enough breathing space for all involved. By dangling the sword of expectation at all times by commanding subversion without reason is unhealthy for any situation. The next time you find yourselves in a spot, where you hear yourself saying “Why was I not the first-to-know?”, pause and think what could be the factors on ground for the other person. Have you given enough reason for the other person to trust in you such that you can truly be the first-to-know? If not, then hold back on your needs, for this is no podium finish you need to secure.
Another kind of expectation, is the one we make from ourselves. This one is inspirational at the surface , but only as long as you can see your intent clearly. You can set goals and target maps to reach that peak you have always dreamt of. But more often than not, in the process of trying to prepare our entire selves to live up to our expectations, we unknowingly fall prey to comparing ourselves to peers or even strangers who have set out to do what we want to do. We end up pushing ourselves to make a point to whoever out there cares enough, that we are better than others. There was a time when I thought bucket lists were about an individual’s choice , their personal dreams to achieve in a life time. Obviously then they are about their personality. That makes each list unique isn’t it? But a simple sampling of these posted bucket lists or even skimming through social media to grasp the pulse tells me , more people want to run a marathon, swim with dolphins and bungee jump! Are these pure coincidences or does it have something to do with how we feel we are perceived as? Perhaps we are unaware of our expectations about how we wish to be viewed as. I think I might fancy “Sitting still without a thought for 10 mins” on my bucket list (and it might just end up being unfinished, but that analysis is for another day).
When it comes to Expectations, I think we are crossing a very crucial invisible junction at present. A point where if we do not take control to demonstrate what we expect from our surroundings, our people and society as a collective, then we will truly translate ourselves into an entire generation of robotic beings , where we become so predictable that our expectations will no longer be called so, they will become norms. The true power of expectations lies in spurring each of us to contribute a part of our ability for the betterment of the world around us. To me it is fictional to think that expectations breed unhappiness. So what? How else do you intend to achieve greater heights without going through pain? What role does man have on Earth if it were merely to observe the gifts of nature without expectation to be a part of the process that leads to collective progress of humanity ?
