(Our moon is waning gibbous, 79% illumination)
(photo R Angert)
Expectations
Expectations are funny creations – molded and polished in our minds and played out often in our sight, hearing, and touch, even our sense of smell. They may have been hatched by an event in a dream, a song lyric, or a comment overheard while standing in line. And now-a-days they are often germinated from others’ expectations posted on-line.
But expectations supply the foundations for plans and plans lead to action, reaction, and reasoning. Expectations are easy for some of us to achieve and seemingly impossible for others of us. How many times do we under-estimate our abilities, the external conditions, the phrase uttered by another or the quality of those expensive hiking socks? And the opposite: over-estimating those same things?
For so many of us the Camino provides a lab environment for testing Expectations. Just how long is a ‘long day’ for me today? And for that other guy, the one who reminds you of your grandfather? How long was his day? How DID he beat you to the albergue?
The pilgrims walking the camino these days have some different challenges. Living in Astorga we meet and speak to pilgrims often and I thought I’d share one experiences Ann and I had recently.
Meet Ross. He is from Australia and earned the chef position on a large private yacht recently completed in northern Europe. He was involved in the food storage and prep area planning and construction and its maiden voyage was to Malaga where he was given ten weeks off before meeting the ship again in the Caribbean. At least that is what I recall from our café con leche conversation. He is used to living out of a backpack and thought that the Camino was a perfect use of his time. He began his walk in León and stayed in a hotel for three days when the city was in isolation – no pilgrims allowed to stop or eat there, but could walk through. He enjoyed seeing the town and eating at restaurants unaware of the lockdown which he was amazed to find out about after leaving León. Because of Galician weather and shutdowns in the days since he jumped on a bus to Portugal and is walking there.
I’d guess he had some expectations that varied from a sail from Europe to the Caribbean, that varied from the things he’d read about walking the Camino and more. It is this shaping of the expectation that brings pleasure to some of us and distress to others. Often it includes both, don’t you think?
So what of our expectations these days? Phil is expecting to ‘get an elk’ and enjoy that special time tracking them down with old friends and Wiley as I recall. All of us are preparing for some kind of different holiday season, wondering how that will play out. Many are shaping expectations for this time of year that traditionally includes people, places, and things that might just be impossible now. I’d like to suggest that you let your senses give you hope, your dreams give you new inspiration and that the people you do meet while enjoying coffee add to your lifes’ story and to theirs. Pilgrim, walk the Camino wherever you are.
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Ron Angert in beautiful Astorga, Spain
Dear Ron,
I wanted to acknowledge your post, which is challenging to reflect, and hope to come tomorrow to write more… expectations are such a funny thing… my expectation was to have a relaxing weekend this weekend, but I woke up with a painful locked temporomandibular joint and a stiff neck and shoulders…
Love to you and Ann, and take care as you navigate this second lock-down.
Cris
Thank you Cris, and sorry you have that painful condition and amazed at the spelling of the body part. When I saw the date I was assigned I knew that I had to avoid any connection to the pandemic AND the election so I played with many ideas. But expectations kept coming back, as it is really related to those two current events and everyone has them underlying our journey in life.
Kind of related, I took a wonderful class called ‘Oral Traditions’ which is really storytelling and one of the topics was ‘speaking things into existence’. Now I see people doing this all the time, mostly negative stuff. I try to speak positive and enjoy seeing if it works. So this allows one to put their expectations into words and maybe move them forward.
Have you thought about this? What is your experience?
Dear Ron,
Well, now, I have two topics to reflect on, right?! Or actually, it is only one, and the different “shades of grey” they have.
For example, when I was writing “Temporomandibular joint”, I wrote first “TMJ” which is how I would refer to it when talking to work colleagues or friends who have any training in healthcare. However, that would be to expect that everybody has to understand words or acronyms that maybe you only “meet” when you are in a certain group. So first, our expectations can be in such small tiny places as the words we choose to pronounce, and they can open a deep wide gap between ourselves and the others… a very first “gap” of understanding, leading to misunderstanding, just because I “expect” that the other has to know and see things in the same way I do…
Then we have what we expect of ourselves, sometimes what we think we have to be or do or behave like or… comes from what others expect from us… and it is a painful road when we realize those expectations aren’t ours, and we are disappointing others for not meeting them, or we feel a failure for being unable to fulfill them.
Society expectations have been another heavy brick imposed into everyone’s lives, and they range from which careers we should pursue due to our gender, the “right” sexual orientation, the age to marry, the body weight we should have, and almost an infinite list in between and to the sides.
And then we have our owns, how we expect our lives should unfold or should have unfolded, what we deserve due to our behaviour, or our good intended acts or wills, or the efforts we have invested (again, to name a few.) And yet, our lives do not take the shape we expected. And we correct our path like the GPS “Recalculando”, and yet, it doesn’t happen.
What do we do then? As much as I identify with the Buddha in lots of things, I live too immersed in this earthy world to be able to “drop the expectations”, and no matter how challenging my life has been, I am still optimistic to believe in Dante’s idea of hell, with the sign in the door reading “Abandon Hope”… After some personal work, I returned to be on the side of John Lennon and Martin Luther King… I still have dreams. But that is different than having expectations… life will unfold as it can, a combination of my genetics, my own attachment pattern, my inner work that hopefully is turning me away from unhealthy learnings and leading me to make the decisions I think best, and the environment -that includes a pandemic, crazy politicians leading the different countries in this world, climate change, but also experiences like the Camino, and thousands of random encounters with people like Ross (or Phil, or yourself…)
The movie The Way has this amazing line: “You don’t choose a life, you live one”; and I believe there is a lot of wisdom about expectations there.
Thank you for the opportunity to reflect with you on this, Ron! I love that and I am very grateful to you!
Afecto y Abrazos,
Cris
PS: I will reflect on the “storytelling” part tomorrow. As the Boss (AKA Phil) goes hunting “expecting for an Elk”, we will keep this blog running in the comments, I believe!
I’m sorry that I missed read your comments, for whatever reason the notification email isn’t working for me on this one blog post.
Anyway I’m typing on a phone screen so it will be short. I think that the TMJ is a good example of how we expect that people we communicate with have the same language, cultural filters and experiences that ‘everyone’ has.
I leave you with this: https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2020/11/10/today-the-archer-in-english/
In honor of Phil the archer & mentor of us all.
More when I get to a keyboard…