A couple weeks ago I wanted to get on here and moan about expectancy and that sort of thing, due to some goings-on that had left me a little disillusioned, which isn’t an altogether uncommon occurrence as you may or may not already know. As could be surmised from that last entry, I wasn’t having a particularly articulate week, and I couldn’t really find a thread to be able to adequately discuss what I was thinking at the time.

Well, even though my outlook has changed slightly since then, I’ll still discuss expectancy some. I feel like my go-with-the-flow attitude has been developed in no small part due to necessity as much as to natural leanings. The reason being that expectancy causes a great deal of superfluous stress, and stress causes me to not function as a human being very well.

From an early age I have been taught through school projects and being stranded places by my forgetful parents that you can’t really count on anyone but yourself to have your same priorities, and to contribute fully to those ends that you yourself deem to be important. I don’t mean to imply that all people are untrustworthy, but that with a high degree of probability, they have something that they would prefer to do than what you would have them do. It’s simply a matter of perspective.

The end result, however, is that you learn that the only person who shares your priorities is you, and chances are you become jaded and isolationist believing that the world is out to get you and the like. I’m not really an exception to the rule, although I’ve more passively decided to just count on myself and not expect much of other people, to avoid the feeling of being let down.

Of course sometimes I still manage to become excited at a prospect, and almost invariably it seems that the more I allow myself to get worked up, the less likely the prospect is to come through at the scheduled time. Of course my view is probably skewed, but every time such a thing occurs, it strengthens my resolve never to rely on outside sources for satisfaction.

This isn’t to say that one should sit in a state of idleness and complacency, for there is another aspect of this way of living, and that is the element of surprise. That is to say that as you create your own world in which you can live happily, then there is the possibility of the unexpected to take place, which is where further delight and wonder can enter into your life. The stipulation is that you must do enough to allow these surprises to take place. You must partake in acts of risk-taking without expecting any return on your investments.

I don’t mean to imply that I live my life as the perfect ideal of what I just described, far from it. I’m just trying to put forth a model of how my own personal life could work to make me happy within my own structure of morals, ideals and abilities. This way I can encourage myself to continue in the taking of risks and the doing of good deeds, which are things I try to do day by day to improve myself and my life.

Anyway, as I mentioned I had suffered a couple of setbacks wherein I had gotten excited and let down, but in the ensuing weeks I received a series of wonderful surprises that more than restored my faith in humanity and in the way of things, and I just wanted to take some space to thank the purveyors of these surprises, because it is you who make my little life-system work.

So it would seem that the golden “Do unto others…” rule does indeed apply after all, but the “others do unto you” part typically won’t come from where you expect it. When you start expecting things, it seems that’s when people get hurt and stressed out and so on. This is just my own observation based on experience.

That’s all I have on this subject, but I’m going to go ahead and write a Thanksgiving entry too.

Yeah yeah yeah.. I know. I’ve been slacking. Luckily, nobody really cares that much.

I started off with so much momentum, started the blog, was writing a whole bunch of tunes, keeping up on schoolwork, taking care of myself and my apartment, studying at the library, submitting stuff, just generally trying to make myself useful. And now I’m reeeeally starting to drag again. It happens every semester. Not just during the semester, during the summers too.

So anyway, I’ve just kind of felt like I don’t have anything interesting to write about. Which is stupid, because I can write a blog entry on anything, like that pungent rotting fruit that I have to trudge through on the way to class, or the fact that I woke up this morning and the water had been shut off, or that I just got another invoice from my realtor and have to go back over there again to straighten out more stupid crap, or even my projects that I’ve been working on, or the weather which is getting all cold again.

It’s kind of funny that all of the things I just listed are things that are out of the ordinary, or things that are in a state of flux. Things that aren’t new and exciting kind of fade into the background. I wouldn’t probably write about that stretch of Boylston I walk down every day, unless they were doing construction, or shooting a movie or something. I probably wouldn’t mention anything about my apartment that I’ve been living in for several months, unless I had gotten something new to put in it, or if it had burned down or something.

It’s just the way we are wired as people. Our brain has this amazing ability to focus, to ignore everything but what has changed. Otherwise our senses would be completely overloaded constantly. Imagine always being aware of the soundscape at the same time that you feel every current of air passing over your skin, taste the inside of your mouth, smell your own deodorant, and see every object within your field of vision equally well. Just imagining it is enough to make me want to lie down and pass out.

And so nature has given us this ability, in order to avoid overstimulation, to filter out that to which we are accustomed, to acclimate ourselves to the surrounding environment. It is a revolutionary talent, it is one of the things that man has yet to understand or reproduce in his own creations. It’s what allows us to perceive the world, and still have some brain power left over to interpret what we are perceiving. It’s what allows us to understand.

Yet however revolutionary and incredible the benefits are, as with everything, that’s how tragic the downside is. Whatever it was that made you happy a month ago, has faded into the background. We are not allowed to forge a perfect, happy world for ourselves and then sit back and relax and enjoy the rest of life in a state of unadulterated bliss. It just doesn’t work that way, because soon we would find ourselves craving something new and exciting. We were meant to struggle to be happy. Because without unhappy, there would be no happy.

I don’t necessarily mean to imply that it is all related to our brain chemistry. Part of it may very well be societal. I think about how tribal people who lived on the same patch of land their entire lives and were never exposed to the rest of the world must have lived. They didn’t know that they had the option to change their lives. Maybe they were perfectly content since they didn’t even see a choice there. Maybe I simply feel worthless at times because I see the opportunities and possibilities around me every day, ones that I choose not to take. If I decided one day to take all of those opportunities, my life would be completely different at the time I go to bed from how it was when I woke up. And then, boy, I would have a lot to write about. For a couple weeks.

In any case, maybe we do have a sort of innate need for some sort of constancy after all. Because the farther I go, the more I realize that there is nothing I can count on to be a permanent fixture in life, and it’s scary as hell. Leaving everything behind, well that can be a revolution too. And, as I mentioned, there is an upside and a downside to everything. New stuff to write about, yet no one left to read and understand it.

I guess my point is, you can’t count too much on things to be constant. Not even *gasp* this blog. Because it just may let you down someday.