Expectations

"I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, then it is beautiful" - Fritz Perls

Maybe it was the "all nighter" I pulled with Lukas last night or just a lot of pondering I do when given a spare moment, but something got me thinking about expectations last night.

Life is full of expectations.  The way we are raised, our life experiences, the relationships we have all shape our expectations.  I would like to say that my parents set reasonable but high expectations on me as a child and I, in turn, have always placed high expectations on myself.  This can be a blessing and a curse.

I think it is very important that I maintain a set of expectations in my life.  I even think it is important that we have expectations of our family and friends.  I mean, if we never expected much out of the people we associated with what stops us from hanging around with a "bad crowd" or lowering our own expectations in response to our environment.  But where is the line in the sand?  What happens when my expectations on someone, don't come close to the expectations they have on themselves?  What about when their life experiences have lead them to draw different conclusions and expectations on a situation that don't match mine?  When does placing my expectations on someone else, become selfish?

 As I have grown up, I have realized on several occasions that my expectations don't necessarily meet other's expectations and vice versa.  This has also become blatantly apparent while parenting.  How I expect someone to react in a certain situation doesn't always happen and it can generate conflict.  I even set expectations on the small inconsequential things that happen during a day.  How I want my work day to go, how I want a special night with the husband to go, how I want my children to behave.  Then, I get upset if everything doesn't go as I expected in my mental plan.  Am I setting up someone for failure when I set expectations on them?

Here are a couple of examples:

When I ask Cody to take out the trash and he says, "Yes", I expect him to take it out right then.  When I walk by 30 minutes later and the trash is still in the can, I get frustrated.  My expectations on the time frame that the trash should be taken out wasn't the same as his.  Will the trash get taken out? Yes.  Will it be on my time frame? Not always.

Since the kids have been sleeping through the night for several months, we have come to expect that they will sleep solidly through the night.  When we have a night that they wake several times & need assistance going back down or a morning that they wake up at 5:45 AM, we get frustrated, because our expectations on their sleep habits didn't get met.

I sometimes have to set back and re-evaluate a situation, really mull it over in my mind.  Would I have gotten upset if I hadn't placed this un-needed expectation on them/the situation.  If I look at it from another angle, can the "perfect" (insert plan foiled due to expectations) still be salvaged?  Most of the time the answer is yes and a lot of the time some of the best things that ever happen to us are unexpected.