Expectations

Human are the creators of their own destiny. At least that’s what today’s confident people want to believe. Gone are the days when we went on doing our work only because we had to. A farmer’s son had to be a farmer, so for a potter, so for a milkman, so for an engineer & a doctor. But they have grown individual identities, they have learnt to voice their own opinions, frame their own expectations of life.

Expectations are as inherent to our everyday life as soul is to the body. This reflects in everything we do, we think, we dream. Suppose, I want to have an ice-cream. Here what do I expect? I expect my desire to get fulfilled. From expectations lead to desires, desires lead to attachment, and attachment leads to all the miseries of life. But we can’t help it. After all, we are humans. Emotions, passions, desires, attachments, expectations are all the keywords for a human, right?

Sometimes, we think we are wise to hail a “Don’t-care” tag. But no matter how hard you try to push yourself to the edge, but still you want to hang on. Take this: I have a fascination for photography from my childhood. I saved my pocket-money to buy a Kodak KB-20 camera. But later my uncle proposed to give a Nikon automatic camera on the proposal that I give away the former to my sister and let her do what she wants with it. I agreed. But still today when I find that in a miserable condition, covered with dust, I feel a silent pang in my heart. I feel safe when it is with me.

These are all very small things that even don’t matter after awhile. But when it worsens when it comes to the most complicated thing in human life: relationships.

There are a lot of expectations in each and every relationship we have. We expect our friends to be loyal, to respect our sentiments, to keep our privacy, to show us sympathy, to lend a helping hand in times of need, to let us share the unspoken words, to inspire us. Friends make a separate world for us altogether, without them there would be a huge void in each of our lives.

But when it comes to love, the expectations are boundless. At that stage of life, when we are mature enough and have enough strength in our hearts to love, we have already grown some expectations of our life, an image of our dream soul-mate, and also some fundamental opinions and principles in our lives. When it becomes incompatible with the person we’ve fallen for, we cannot change our ways of thinking, instead we try to change the other person!

But here is the fallacy! We love a person when we love everything about him/her. From the way she smiles, she dresses, to the way she itches and burps! If we try to change the person, then it implies that we haven’t completely loved that person. We just have seen the already built ‘image’ of our soul-mate in her, and we try to make the image more pronounced by trying to change her. Seems like she’s just a Barbie in our hand, waiting to be turned into anything we want!

Expectations are all ‘private-properties’. They are to be ‘expected’ only but not to be imposed. If you do not like the person as he/she is, then you never liked him anyway. Let your expectations play at your own garden and don’t let them invade the others’.