Musings on just what makes me tick. Results may vary.
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.
