There are only two things you have to do in life. You have to live until you die. The rest you make up. Source Unknown
When I was a high school teacher, I would tell my students:
Don’t live down to other people’s expectations of you.
What I didn’t realize then and what I am more acutely aware of now is how we tend to live down to our own expectations of ourselves. It’s understandable.
If, during those critical formative years of your life (from birth to early adulthood) you’ve been given the message, directly or indirectly, that *realistically*, you can only aspire to so much, achieve this much and settle for this lifestyle, then it’s easy to see how the message becomes so ingrained it pretty much replays itself. From here on, you don’t need anyone telling you how little is expected of you. You tell yourself and mostly subconsciously.
The funny thing is, having been conditioned into smallness, our self-calibration makes so many things in life *difficult* or *hard* or *scary*.
Why don’t you learn to play the guitar?
It’s too hard.
Why don’t you leave your job and do what you really enjoy doing?
It’s too hard.
There’s an irony in that, don’t you think? That it’s too *hard* to do what you enjoy doing? I am being deliberately provocative.
People say it’s too hard to quit their job and do what they really want to do for a number of reasons which they, unfortunately, summarize and misrepresent with the word or idea of *hard*.
What they really mean is that they believe that it’s hard to give up the security of a steady income and if they happen to have a big salary job, then it’s hard to give up the size of that income too which has provided for a desired *standard of living* (though not necessarily a desired quality of living).
They also believe that *doing what you love* isn’t likely to be financially lucrative.
I love surfing. How’s that going to make me money?
I love bush walking. How’s that going to make me money?
We live in societies that want to assure us that they are doing the best they can to ensure our safety and wellbeing while also constantly reminding us of how unsafe we are and how vulnerable we are to the extreme fluctuations in global finance, climate and politics and the equally unpredictable forces of human nature.
We have schools and universities and colleges that supposedly ensure that we acquire certain skills that will make us employable. Employment ensures income and income ensures survival.
We have *Social Security* that supposedly ensures that those who don’t quite make employment will be provided with assistance to survive.
We have all forms of *Insurance policies* covering health, life, travel, property and even marriage. (One could argue that marriage itself is an insurance policy but I’ll leave that for another post).
We have Governments, the Armed Forces, the Police, Religions and Prisons that supposedly ensure our national interests and personal safety.
Through these and other institutions, we are encouraged to buy into the notion of certainty and we do. We go to school, we get jobs, we pay our taxes, we subscribe to a religion, we take out insurance policies and we get married.
But certainty is not something you can buy no matter how eloquently a politician may attempt to convince you of it or how attractive and test-free an insurance policy may be. And yet, it doesn’t stop us from seeking certainty and often rather desperately and at the expense of our deepest longings and yearnings.
We want to know that no matter what happens, we’ll be safe. It’s a fundamental human need. After all, we’ve come into this world with absolutely nothing but our body and brain. We then spend a lifetime acquiring things that we have, individually and collectively, placed value on – things that we believe add to who and what we are or, as some may argue, that make us who and what we are.
It’s understandable that we don’t want to lose these things – money, degrees, status, life partners, property, beliefs etc – not after we’ve spent a lifetime accumulating (and defending them) with considerable effort!
Now, there’s an interplay between expectations of ourselves and our need for certainty.
What I expect of myself determines how much certainty I need around such an expectation.
For example, if I expect to lose at the poker machines, I want to be certain that I have enough money to handle my losses.
Or, if I expect to try and fulfil some of my partner’s needs, I want to be certain that he or she will try to fulfil some of mine.
So you see, for most of us, life is a game of setting expectations and establishing certainties. Unfortunately, for most of us, the game is not much fun any more, assuming it ever was.
We struggle to *live up* to our own expectations of ourselves as well as to other’s expectations of us when the truth is:
There is NO expectation we can possibly have that comes close to our true potential!
Consequently, in our dominant, expectation-driven and certainty-dependent worldview, we often fail. And the more we *fail*, the more we crave the certainty that we’ll be loved and accepted and cared for unconditionally. And we’re frequently painfully denied. Whatt’s frighteningly sadder is that we demand this certainty from others because we have ceased to find it within ourselves.
Now some people may think that this is the best we can hope for. At least we’ll get some *wins*.
The way I see it, those *wins* are what keeps us in a perpetual state of disempowerment and limitation. When we think we have succeeded, we’re elated and think we’re invincible. But when we fail, we feel horribly small, powerless and *not enough*. Consequently, we keep struggling to win, we become addicted to winning and we find new and different ways to *win*.
This oppressive addiction was so perfectly captured in the movie, Cool Runnings. It’s a true story about a Jamaican bobsled team (a creative endeavor well outside anyone’s expectations!) that decided to compete in the 1988 winter Olympics in Canada. The coach they enlisted was a former though disgraced captain of the wining Canadian bobsled team many years before. He had been found to have cheated unbeknownst to the Jamaican team.
When the captain of the Jamaican team, Derice, unexpectedly finds out, he asks the coach why he had cheated. After all, he had won clean in the previous Olympics. The coach replies:
It’s a fair question. It’s quite simple, really. I had to win. You see, Derice, I had made winning my whole life, and when you make winning your whole life, you have to keep on winning, no matter what. Understand?
Derice doesn’t.
No, I don’t understand. You won two gold medals. You had it all.
To which coach Irv replies:
Derice, a gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.
I have not come across anything that more powerfully and simply lays down these fundamental truths to us:
- Our addictions arise from our beliefs in our *not-enough-ness*, our *inabilities* and our *fears*
- We are inherently and fundamentally *enough*
So where do we go from here?
Doubt is not a pleasant mental state but certainty is a ridiculous one. Voltaire
Perhaps this question might help:
What defines you?
Please, answer the question before you continue reading.
Here are some answers I’ve heard:
My values
The things I believe in
My character
The service I give others
My role as a parent, teacher, doctor, pastor…
My culture
My community
My achievements/successes
The company I keep
My actions
The way I live my life
I find it hard to define myself
Often, it’s a combination of these.
A Zen flavored answer to the question might be: Who is asking? Or What is *you*?
A Transcendentalist might answer: My connection with all that is.
A Catholic might answer: How I do unto others what I would like done unto me.
So, what was your answer? Seriously?
I think it’s an important question to ask yourself because it gets right to the heart of WHO or WHAT you believe yourself to be and this belief or beliefs about yourself speak to the two KEY themes that I brought into my discussion:
Expectations of yourself
Needing certainty
And, as I said earlier, there’s an interplay between them.
What you believe about yourself determines what expectations you have of yourself and the certainties you need around those expectations.
Let me suggest 2 extreme scenarios:
1st Scenario
You believe that you are a perfect expression of Divine Intelligence or God or Universal Energy. You therefore have the highest expectations of yourself knowing that there is nothing you cannot achieve if you set your mind – your thoughts and good feelings – to it.
You also understand that this temporal world, shaped by space and time, can never offer you any kind of certainty, at least not one that is truly and deeply meaningful to you. You therefore let go of the need for certainty and instead live in the moment as fully, as joyously and as freely as you can.
2nd Scenario
You believe that you are an imperfect human being, flawed from birth possibly with original sin. You believe that there is some Power, external to yourself, that dictates your destiny and judges your progress toward this destiny, withholding from and granting things to you according to its judgments.
Your expectations of yourself are really what you believe are expectations that this Power has of you. You find these expectations both unattainable as well as constraining but you are afraid to object. After all, you believe that you must strive to be perfect in order to be judged favorably.
Since your life and your destiny are determined by a Power external to yourself that judges you, your need for certainty is high. You need to know that you’ll be judged favorably and so you strive to make sure you do not displease this Power. It’s a hard game but you feel you have no other choice.
Now, I know that these scenarios appear extreme at first, but if you really reflect on them, you’ll see that they are pretty much how we live our lives. You’re probably inclined to think that most of us fall on some point in between (yes, remember that bell-shaped curve???) but I’m more inclined to say that most of us live according to the second scenario, at least until we *wake up* and shift from the deceits of darkness into the truths of light.
What deceits? What truths?
Deceits about who we believe we are, how we are defined and what we dare to expect.
Truths about who we are, how we cannot be defined and what we are here for.
What is ultimately true needs no defending. What is untrue cannot be defended.
When we each encounter truth and choose to live by it, life does become effortless for we have freed ourselves from the tyrannical need for certainty and freed ourselves to live beyond anyone’s expectations including our own! Not that’s what I call a life worth living!
Living beyond Expectations and without Certainties!
Lucy
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