Opening for Joys and Concerns

WHY?

If you are a true believer in the interconnectedness of all things, then everything happens for a reason. Throughout my life I have asked many questions about what I have experienced. Why was my father killed? Why do some good people suffer so much? I kept asking why, as if the answer would make everything seem alright. It’s as if I needed an answer so that these parts of life that absolutely were not my expectation, would suddenly be ok. Really now, what explanation would do that? So the older I get, the less I ask why. The less I ask why, the more I can just experience life for myself and those around me, right now.

In the words of Baba Ram Das……

Remember…Be Here Now

Opening for Designated Plate

Different People, Different Place, Different Expectations

I awoke this morning, expecting to be alive. I expected all of my family to be safe. I expected food in my refrigerator. I expected water to come from the tap. I expected my car would start and take me where I needed to go. I expect my house to be cool in the summer and warm in the winter, with a comfortable bed to lie upon. For my sister’s in Haiti, I think their expectations are very different. They too may expect to be alive; they also may expect that their day may hold mortal dangers. They may expect to have to decide how to divide the food for the day. They may expect to struggle through another summer without the means to protect their family from the sun, the bugs and the lack of drinking water. They may hope for a doctor to come their way, but not expect it. There are those in the world whose expectations are so basic, compared to ours. We constantly need to remember that difference and as Unitarian Universalists, I believe that is an idea we strive to keep in the forefront of our thoughts.

Sermon

The dictionary defines expectations as the act or state of looking forward or anticipating. It gives synonyms as outlook, potential, opportunity or hope. Some say an expectation is a predetermined disappointment or resentment. No matter how you look at it, an expectation changes your perception by having a pre determined picture of what is to come.

I did not expect it, but just a month ago a book was released called “The Black Swan, the impact of the highly improbable”, written by, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The premise of the book in very simplistic terms is our avoidance of the acceptance of improbable acts. For centuries the world believed Swans were all white. The reason for this is because that is all that people saw. Taleb writes, “It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge.”

To see a black swan for the first time, with the expectation that all swans are white, holds three principle characteristics. 1. It is unpredictable. It lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. 2. It carries a massive impact. 3. Human nature makes us concoct an explanation for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

September 11, 2001. By all accounts, that was a horrific day. One we never expected, and yet after the fact we have tried to make sense of it. The media is an activist in grabbing our uncertainty and turning it into a reality. What didn’t we see in the past, what did we know and ignore. No one seems to talk about what we did know would still in no way make us expect people to fly planes into office buildings. That act was truly a Black Swan. The tragedies of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were unexpected. In hindsight, blame, the need to make it explainable, has been thrown to the government, both local and federal. Why couldn’t the weathermen been better at predicting? Why didn’t the Army Corps of Engineers keep up with the maintenance of the levees? Was it global warming that has the seas rising? Only once did I hear that in 1930 there was a commission for 13 locks and dams along the Mississippi River. This project prevented silt from flowing to the sea and keeping a string of outer islands above water with plants and trees. In the past, these bits of land took the brunt of such storms. Who mentioned that we had never had a storm of this magnitude hit a large city directly before? That was our Black Swan that year.

On a daily basis, you, me, all of us have expectations of others and for some reason, we do not inform them of what they are. We expect them to somehow know what they are, through some kind of osmosis. In addition we expect others to live up to those unsaid expectations. We are disappointed when they don’t. You can see how convoluted this can get. This could be a stranger, or a friend, a spouse or a child. Taleb writes, “Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the normal, particularly with the “bell curve” methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviation, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. He calls it GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud. Our minds are incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability and so our minds become explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything. Our expectation becomes our reality. I remember a new acquaintance said to me, “we are going to be great friends.” My reply was, “we will see after our first fight.” I was looking outside of the bell curve.

Think about how unfair expectations can be. Here is a fictitious example, because my husband, Pat, does the dishes all the time.

However, assume I am leaving the house for the day and I expect my husband to do the dishes while I am gone, as he is working at home. I leave and upon my return I see the dishes are right where I left them. Now I am irritated and may do them myself in disgust. I may never tell my husband about my expectation or disappointment and just add it to my list of what irritates me in life. Now I have resentment to carry around as well. The longer we keep our expectations to ourselves, the harder it is for others to fulfill them. Because I did the dishes myself, my husband never even gets the chance to fulfill my expectation, but instead he has become my disappointment without ever leaving his home office. However, if I had just asked him before leaving to do those dishes………….

A counselor told me about a couple that had come to see her. Separately they explained to the counselor what was going on in their relationship. The woman was sure her husband did not love her anymore. She just kept saying, he does not say “I Love you”. I say it and he gives me a hug, but he won’t say the words. He forgets plans that we have made, so he must not be listening to me or want to be with me. She was suspicious he was having an affair, since she was sure he no longer loved her, and he unexpectedly brought her flowers sometimes. She was considering divorce because his behavior was not changing. The husband, on the other hand, talked about how he liked to hug, but felt his wife was always pulling away. His work load was very heavy right now and he was frustrated because she made plans without asking him. She never reminded him and he sometimes forgot. Some days he would think about how much he cared for her so much that he would stop and buy her flowers. He thought that she may be falling out of love with him because she seemed really irritated with him these days. He was afraid.

Obviously, these two needed to talk to each other more and that is not as rare as you might think, but the point I am really trying to make is that each of them had unspoken expectations that clearly turned from disappointment to resentment to fear. She was looking for the words “I Love You” and missing the other signs. He feared losing her and so did not ask to have his needs met. When you expect others to know the way you feel, you are not giving them the respect they are due. You are not respecting that they have their own way of thinking and feeling. It is selfish to expect the rest of the world to think or act like you do. There are ways in which I force myself to learn. I take an 8 ½ X 11 piece of paper and write a particular lesson I want to learn on it. I put it somewhere I look everyday, usually more than once. The bathroom mirror works for me now. When I was younger, living alone, I did this all over my little abode. It was an apartment of about 600 square feet. I put sheets of paper on the bathroom mirror, in every door way and on every window. Picture this little place with about 20 pieces of paper hanging everywhere, for everyone to see who came in. It works! What the signs said was, “the rest of the world is not like me”. For 30 days I looked at that thought, pounding into my head that people do not look at situations the way I do, they do not react to situations like I do, they do not have the same set of feelings as I do, they did not have the same history that I did. I was finally convinced that it is impossible for anyone to look at or feel any situation in exactly the same way that I do. That lesson has been invaluable every day of my life! It keeps me from expecting others to react, feel or do what I do. It forces me to respect the differences in each of us. It forces me to look at what someone else can bring to a situation, even though it comes in a way that is foreign to me.

What we infer about what we don’t know, distorts the process of what we do know. Look at this situation. You meet someone for the first time. You have heard that they are really a jerk. If that judgment becomes your expectation, instead of waiting to make our own assessment, you are now waiting for this person to live up to what you have heard. Even though, what you may have heard came out of someone else’s unfulfilled expectation. It is so important in human relationships to form your own experiences and not have an expectation built on someone else’s experience. It is just as important to allow people to change. If you are always expecting someone to be how you once experienced them in the past, you are not allowing them to change. You will not see any new behavior; you will only wait for behavior which fits your expectation. That is so unfair and disrespectful. In conversation, expectations can change the very essence of its content that you come away with. Conversation is the informal interchange of thoughts. The key word here is interchange. You cannot be listening to that interchange if you have an expectation about what the other person might say. Neither can you really hear if you are thinking of what you will say next. Try this exercise sometime. While you are having a conversation with someone, purposefully be aware of making yourself really listen to the other person by stopping yourself from thinking about what you are going to say next or what you expect their reaction or opinion to be. I use the word purposefully, because I know for myself that to change any automatic behavior, I must really think about what I am doing or trying to do.

Not all expectations are bad. Expectations can be a motivator as well. Our expectation for ourselves is what motivates us to accomplish goals. The more realistic our expectations are the more apt we are to reach our goal. My expectation was that if I trained long enough, I could walk a marathon. I did that. Had my expectation been I would run a marathon in four hours, I would have been sadly disappointed.

I want to read an excerpt from a book called 100 simple secrets of Happy People, by Dr. David Niven.

The chapter is called have realistic expectations.

READING

Buddhists believe that to be devoid of expectation is to truly be in the “NOW” Although my expectation is not to become a Buddhist monk, I find that the less expectation I have about everything, the weather, people, the world, the more I can experience them as they are, not what I expect or others expect them to be. Disappointment rears its ugly head much less often that way too.

When an expectation does become a disappointment, I find it useful to define my expectation that was not met. I mean this in the most specific terms. Sometimes by defining what my expectations were, I can find that they were unreasonable or unattainable. In other words, if in defining my expectation of another, I find that what I want is for them to change something that has happened in the past, that is unattainable. None of us can change what has already occurred. I just might learn that it is I who must change. Then I end up with a learning experience about myself instead of the pain of disappointment. This is helpful whether your expectation is about a relationship with another person, work or even here at Sunnyhill. There is nothing wrong with taking lemons and making lemonade.

Expectations permeate our lives in so many ways. So many of us expect what we read in the papers, hear on the news, see on the internet is true. We are learning. In our schools the kids are no longer allowed to use Wikipedia as a reference, because we cannot expect the information there to be true.

Expectations vary in different cultures, regions and circumstances. A sense of fulfillment or happiness is different. In our society, as children, our expectations deal with survival. We instinctively expect to be taken care of. As teenagers, we have many un-met expectations, because, well, we are teenagers and our expectation of the world all being like we want it to be, all of the time, is not fulfilled. In middle age our expectation may be to enjoy the fruits of our labor, with adult toys like, motorcycles and boats or travel. The elderly may expect their families to take care of them.

We can hide in our expectations. Even though they may cause us resentment and/or disappointment, it is sometimes easier than accepting that our expectations will not be met. We can become so comfortable in our disappointment. We can become afraid, on a subconscious level, of truly accepting situations as they are, even though that pain would allow us to move on. If we feel undeserving, expectations can be a way to set ourselves up to fail. Expectations are many times connected to what others will do or say or act out. We must constantly strive to be aware that we can only control our own selves.

So, in part, we have expectations to prohibit the thought of randomness. Think of how out of control we would feel with the true acceptance of pure random acts?

In the book, The Black Swan, Taleb tries to show that our need to process without things being random is physiological as well.

He writes, with so many brain cells, one hundred billion and counting, the attic of our brain is quite large, so that difficulties probably do not arise from storage capacity limitations, but may be just indexing problems. Your conscious, or working memory, is considerably smaller than the attic. Consider that your working memory has difficulty holding a mere phone number longer than seven digits. Change metaphors slightly and imagine that your consciousness is a desk in the Library of Congress; no matter how many books the library holds, and makes available for retrieval, the size of your desk sets some processing limitations. Compression is vital to the performance of conscious work. Andry Nikolayevich Kolmogorov wrote:

We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into our heads. The more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is.

And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

We are in control of our expectations. That makes me think of this prayer:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can and Wisdom to know the difference.

Closing Words

I had a friend, a member of this congregation, named Emily Sohier. She died several years ago and while she was in the last few months of her life, we probably spent more time together than any other time in our relationship. This was certainly not something I expected. What I learned from her during that time has remained a part of my being. Her expectations about time became non existent. The sicker she became the more she lived for the moment. She wrote a letter to Sunnyhill thanking everyone for their kindness. In that message she taught me about how much more difficult it is, although enriching, to live without expectations. I have the following excerpt of that letter by my desk at home and read it daily…, she wrote:

Each day is a challenge for me to comprehend life in a new way.