When the Bell Rings
When the bell rings form an orderly queue.
When the bell rings line up for your dinner.
When the bell rings.... hold on, the bell is ringing and nothing is happening?
Embracing the Journey
It is completely reasonable to set ambitious, even seemingly unattainable goals in life. What appears to be less reasonable is expecting life to turn out exactly as we imagined.
This is not uncommon. We are, after all, prediction making beings. It is in our nature to attempt to imagine outcomes and the consequences of cause and effect actions. Of course in some areas of life we are better at this than others. There are plenty of people that manage to live very predictable lives. Right up until close to the end of them.
This is a reasonable choice after all. Living to an old age in relative peace and harmony with your neighbours is no small accomplishment. But it has been noted amongst some of the people who have realised this that it is not uncommon to hear the phrase, "What was it all about?" - 'It' being life.
Balancing Expectations
It's not that the pursuit of peace and harmony and security is wrong in themselves, it is perhaps more the point that, many of the people who settle into this way of living are not wholly responsible for creating it, but rather, just bought into a system that was already there.
Along with the peace and harmony they accepted the fact that they would trade a significant portion of each day and service to it, never really questioning if they could achieve it for themselves with less effort.
To be fair we are all born into a system that was already there. My point is more a question of engagment. To what degree do we have an input in creating the communities in which we live - and to what degree do we just slot ourselves into a pre-existing function - some of which seemed to serve no real purpose at all?
Defining Your Intent
Along with conflict one of the greatest causes of stress in our lives is the delay we experience between an expectation that we have of life, or ourselves, and the realisation of that expectation. Especially when we have layered over that expectation a value or meaning that we feel dependent on.
The question is, is it really worthwhile? The thing that you were doing to get the thing that you were getting. Is it really worthwhile? Is there a way of being, a way of living, you know in potential, but have yet to realise, that would be more worthwhile? The sort of life you could leave knowing that it was the best choice you could've made?
Of course, life rarely comes with such guarantees. But perhaps it's not about the expectation of fulfillment in life, but rather the engagement with a path that has a greater probability of leading towards it. A life where one could detach from the outcomes themselves and whether the journey of discovery in life was fulfilment enough?
The thing is, if we do not condition ourselves then our chance of falling pray to the conditioning of those around us almost seems inevitable. Does it not?
An Invitation to Choose
Ivan Pavlov's experiments on dogs, which determined this idea of operant conditioning, showed how easy it is for us to get conditioned to expectations, whether those expectations are our own, or are offered to us by the groups in which we live.
Setting our own expectations in life and not meeting them can be a source of great stress, especially if those expectations lead to times and places that are for the most part unrealisable. However, not setting our own expectations for life means that we can slip more easily into the expectations of others.
So whose expectations will you set as your Northstar?
And what will determine the value - the opinions of those in the world around you, although you find at the centre of you're being - at your core?
Perhaps a mix of both?
Of course, the final answer will be whatever works for you.
My invitation? Buy your own bell, and ring it for yourself.
