You Are Now Leaving Hope...

People often say that we live up to our own expectations. What you don’t hear is how often other people live up to our expectations.

To have an expectation is to expect, with a high degree of certainty that something will take place. As such, we tend to prepare ourselves for the expected. Expecting parents make arrangements to welcome their baby into the world. Expecting graduates make preparations to begin their new career. These are things they are expecting and likewise preparing for.

So…is it wrong to place expectations on other people?

At what point in time did we decide that expecting a baby and expecting someone to call are the same? Did a doctor give you a sonogram of the phone call ready to be made? Of course not. A phone call requires the action of another person…another person who has their own expectations and even more frightening, their own will. So no, we shouldn’t place expectations on other people. They can do what they want, when they want. If we expect certain things from them, we may just be setting ourselves up for disappointment.

….but we still do, don’t we?

That’s the thing. We have begun placing expectations where we use to place something else. Oh what’s that? Oh…right…it’s called hope.

Similar to expectations, hope is expecting something to happen, only with very little certainty that it will actually come into fruition. We’ve seen words being mixed up before; http://notforspectators.blogspot.com/2008/01/slapped-with-it-again.html#links. Just as we previously found that people mix up the word ‘want’ with ‘need’ people mix up ‘hope’ with ‘expect’. We prepare for things we want people to do or say, as if we know for a fact that they are doing to follow through. Of course, when they don’t we become devastated.

Imagine how much more we would avoid being hurt or disappointed if we only place hopes on people instead of expectations?

*sigh*
Hope has tragically died at the treacherous hands of expectation…May it rest in peace.