Wandering thoughts- Part 4: Expectation and acceptance

Voltaire said “We never live; we are always in expectation of living”.

We all have dreams and where there is a dream there has to be a sea of expectations. And when these expectations rule our lives, we surely end up disappointing someone (mostly yourself) in the process because we start measuring our success with an ambiguous scale. But how can one be sure what does he want, till he gets what he wants and see if he likes it or not? In this unending pursuit of desires, a person gets lost in the maze created by himself. But the irony is that these expectations/desires play a very important role in shaping our zeal to achieve our goals. So the question is how do we know whether expectations are good or bad. Actually, the answer is simple – replace your expectations with hope. Because an expectation is a strong belief that something will happen while ignoring the possibilities of failure, while hope is a light belief that something will happen and at the same time acknowledging that other part. We need to accept life with all its unpredictability, as happiness only exists in acceptance. Of course, life will bring many challenges, such as the death of/ separation from someone we love, and it’s not easy to embrace those feelings when we’re suffering and wishing those things would have never happened. But if we start cultivating acceptance in our lives right now, we’ll likely cope with future crises in a different way and view them from a different perspective.

We expect to change our life for good by doing simple things like lose weight, read more books or become a better person, but we are flawed, imperfect and can be easily distracted. And whenever we fail we consistently let ourselves down and fall short of our goals and feel disappointed. But we should never give up on ourselves or lose hope. And as Andy Dufresne in the letter to Red (in movie Shawshank Redemption) wrote, “hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” Accept your failures and try to improve just 1 % each day. You need to stop focusing on the end results and start paying attention to the process, believe me, you will achieve anything in your life.