Soooooooooo NOT What I Had In Mind

           You know those moments that you’ve effectively over-thought and over-planned till you essentially have scripted out all parts of all conversations, experienced all emotional ups and downs, and practically lived the moment at least a hundred varying ways in your mind. Yeah, now you know when you actually get to those moments and nothing (no but like actually NOTHING) turns out anywhere  even close to how you imagined it. I mean, seriously, you would think that something might turn out right every once in a while, but experience has shown me that the more you expect something to happen the more you are ensuring that it doesn’t.

            For this reason, I have come to the unsettling conclusion that expectations are the root of all evil in the world. Come on though, if you really think about it, expectations are the reason that we feel disappointment, the reason that we feel cheated out of things that we’ve never had to begin with, the reason we deal with the loss of things that have never been won. Without expectations, we wouldn’t be forced to suffer through the torment of living a moment that falls so drastically short of our fantasy that our would be reality becomes in actuality a horrifying nightmare. 

           Don’t get me wrong, we would all love to live the dream, but at a certain point, I honestly would give up the dream if I could just have something that didn’t make me sweat, cry, and scream out in agony. But, unfortunately, humans, in all our growing wisdom, have yet to develop a way to prevent expectations.

            Sure, we can squabble on and on about not getting ahead of ourselves, promise not to over think things and just live in the moment, but we all know it’s a load of crap. I mean, even as we feebly attempt to block our imaginations from wandering down the path, we find ourselves already standing at the finish line looking back and willing our body to catch the hell up because the grass is way greener where our minds already are. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if our bodies and minds could just stay in sync during our lifetime, that stupid saying of the grass being greener on the other side or whatever might actually hold true. However, as I’ve attempted to make perfectly clear, our mind is the hare and our bodies the tortoise and no matter how hard we try to convince that pesky little hare to take it slow and such it just keeps on running like the freaking energizer bunny. So, instead of just enjoying the things that we do have, we are constantly expecting something better down the line that our mind has already visualized but inevitably won’t be there anymore once the rest of us gets to the scene.

            Now, I know this sounds all depressing, and trust me, it is. In fact, I hate to break it to you all but I don’t even have a positive or slightly less cynical outlook to give on this point. I mean, I’ve basically explained that expectations suck the very light and soul out of our existence and are completely indestructible and unstoppable. Honestly, I wish I could end this by giving you the ice bullet or the silver stake or the whatever so that you could get rid of those life-ruining expectations. I wish I could tell you to just picture the expectations in your granny’s old suit and oversized hat and laugh them away out of existence just because you're finally able to recognize how stupid they truly are (ps. major brownie points if you can catch this subtle reference).

            But of course, there are no tricks that I have found to stop myself from dreaming my life away into a constant stream of shattered facades and crumbling motion picture endings (but like, if you have some please share!) Nope, we can’t seem to stop my mind from filling in the holes that our eyes can’t see, can’t stop our imaginations from acting out the scenarios our bodies have yet to experience. Instead, to try and cope, we live a life that is contained to our brains, a life that can never be matched in the outside world, and so we continue to retreat into the solace of the perfect world we have created and hope that someday, something may actually come true.

            XOXO

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