Sit With What Is

You are not the problem. Your expectations are.

If you expect everything to work out a certain way, and then, when it inevitably doesn’t, you act as though something has gone wrong, as though some line of code in the matrix of life has been tampered with, as though some great injustice has fallen on your shoulders… Then you are basically asking life to make you miserable.

Unless you lower your expectations, you are always going to feel worse than you could.

But I don’t want to lower my expectations. I want to “think positive”. I want to expect the best of people, and of the world at large. If I lower my expectations, surely I am “tempting fate”.

Nah. You can’t tempt fate. But you can make yourself insane by maintaining unrealistic expectations.

Yeah, but… I want to a happy life. I don’t want to go around being all doom and gloom and thinking the worst and being grumpy and being in a bad mood…

Did I mention doom and gloom, or thinking the worst, or being grumpy, or being in a bad mood? Nope. Being pessemistic is just as destructive to your happiness as being optimstic is. Both are delusions that pull you away from reality.

I like to think of reality as the central point on a spectrum. When your expectations align with reality, you find yourself in the centre. The world makes more sense. It still has its beauty and its mystery, but you are not so constantly shocked and surprised and niggled and slighted and blind-sided.

As your expectations become too optimistic, they stray from reality in one direction. You think that everything and everyone is great, and then you’re incredibly disappointed when nothing can quite match what you had hoped for.

As your expectations become too pessemistic, on the other hand, they stray from reality in the other direction. You think that everybody is out to get you, that the world is a dangerous place, and that there’s no point in anything because something always goes wrong.

The aim is to live in the centre. Live in reality. Reality is neither optimistic nor pessemistic. It simply is. Align with what is. Sit with what is.

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