Making expectations conscious
Posted by john the younger on 01/24/2011 20:58:30
In reply to Re: Time Thieves posted by Eddie on 01/19/2011 11:05:40
Hi Eddie,
Thanks for your kind words and encouragement. Hope to hear from you soon.
In the meantime, I thought I'd share an experience from today that
relates to my “thieves of time” post above.
Today I expected delivery of a new laptop and had spent several days in
thought as to how I would set up it for my daughter and deliver it to
her fully functional to connect with the recently installed wireless
router. By late afternoon it hadn’t arrived and I rechecked the
delivery date on line and discovered it had been pushed back until
tomorrow. Within an hour I was feeling rough, edgy, looking for things
to keep me occupied, eating mindlessly, and definitely thinking about
having a glass of wine. I sat with these feelings for a while (brick in
the lap) until I recognized that I was disappointed! Seems quite
understandable as I write this but at the time it was a revelatory
thought. I played with the disappointment, exaggerating it until it
became a joke and fairly quickly it dissipated.
Often I set up expectations of me, circumstances, and others inevitably
being disappointed, hurt and looking for who or what to blame. In this
particular situation I really had no one to blame and there was nothing
I could do in the moment, so I was feeling rough and looking to burn off
the stored energy I had accumulated to work on the laptop.
This is not so much a “thieves of time” learning experience as it is
about the dangers of setting up expectations while mostly unconscious of
what is happening. Not being in “the” now can be costly.
Unconscious expectations can lead to disappointment which leads to hurt
and unconscious compensations (reactions) in a matter of micro-seconds.
All the best,
john