Expectations

There's a sense of liberty when you live without expectations. But then again I feel that it is part of our nature to have them in life. There's always that thought and hope about how we want things to be in life. Be it as simple as how a food we try should taste like, or how something should unravel in life.

But as Shakespeare said, expectation is the root of all heartache. Does this mean we have to live without any expectation at all? To me... I'd like to put it in this way. I often feel that we shouldn't fill our lives with expectations but with hopes. Expectation is defined as a strong belief that something will happen. Whereas hope is a feeling of expectation. See it? In hope, it hasn't reached that level of expectation. Just a feeling that you want something to happen.

I feel that when you expect something, you want that something to happen how you want it to happen. Whereas when you hope for something, you're just having the feeling of how that something should happen. So in hope, when things don't go your way, you're sort of obliged to let things go? Whereas when you expect something, you're most likely to be hugely disappointed if it didn't happen.

When I was young I often feel like it is impossible to live without expectations. Like really how could we! When we were young we expect ourselves to become somebody. When we go to a nice restaurant with raving reviews, we expect the food to be the best we ever had. We expect a few people to behave in a certain way. We expect people to treat us in a certain way. And so on.

I feel like there's an egoistical character when we constantly expect in life. Because we fail to understand that everything in life is constantly changing. It is impermanent. It never stays the same, and thus there is a high chance that it will be something different from our expectations. And if we fail to see this, and if we become upset because we can't accept this fact, we will suffer.

This is why the third principle of existence in Buddhism is anatta which means non-self. That everything in life doesn't have a "me" in it. And because of this, suffering arises. But we can stop suffering from arising by acknowledging this fact. Then we change our paradigm, so that our whole life will change.

So back to the topic. Does this mean we should live without any expectations at all...? 

My answer would be yes and no. Yes because that's the most perfect way to shield you from heartache. No because I still feel it's part our human nature to have it. But I feel that we do have a way to combine these two together. Instead of holding on to expectations, we should hold on to emptiness!

Okay I'm going to talk about this on another post. Because this is what I've been doing this year it it really helps me to become a happier person in a weird way hahaha. I'll see you on the next post regarding emptiness. I myself have been blown away by this thing that I am doing.