Man. How many days, moments, years have been ruined by expectation?

I do it. I’m not ashamed to admit it. It’s like this vine that grows inside of me….and I can cut it back but when i’m not paying attention that thing has grown into a monster again!

Dr. Tan, one of my teachers who has passed, once said something like “No Expectation, No Depression.”

I sat with that one for a very short while before I realized he was right as rain.

It is the earth friendly roundup I use on my inside vine when it overruns my eco system.

So why am I bringing this up today? As you may have guessed, I expected, was let down, then remembered my own advice. And within literally minutes I was feeling better again.

Want to know how I rooted out expectation? How I bushwhacked it?

It went a little something like this.

I got all bent out of shape because I expected something that didn’t happen. I felt my anger grow (just code for unrequited expectation.) I felt my anxious belly gnawing. I stopped noticing the beauty around me and remembered this was not me. So I took a deep breath and opened my journal and wrote exactly this..

“What would I be doing if I wasn’t expecting this other thing?”

And I kept writing. I would make some tea. I would look at all the boats on the water. I would read. I would do a tarot spread. I would write a blog about how easy it is to get out of funk caused by the ridiculousness of something as transient as expectation.

So I did. I closed the notebook and made some tea. I threw a tarot spread. I watched the boats and in the process saw a rufous Hummingbird which blew my socks off. Then I grabbed my readers and read a chapter in a book I like to just pick at a little and then thought…yeah, this would be a helpful blog post 🙂

And funk?

Gone.

Now, my expectation was that someone would be here by 2 and it’s now 5 hours later. But think how much awesome stuff I could have gotten done in that five hours if I wasn’t expecting over and over and over again?

Well guess what…there is shelf paper that isn’t going to calmly and methodically and precisely lay itself….so I better get to it.

And if you need more help with this…because depression is real….even if only to us….then get good help. Find someone who knows how to listen. They are out there.

But DO check in and find out if the root isn’t expectation and it doesn’t in fact need to be pulled out by its messy boot straps.