Great Expectations
Drive the freeway. Carry your plant.
This is an experiment.
These are my thoughts.
This is unfiltered.
The third contribution in this attempt. I recently completed my bachelor thesis. The subsequent phase and my thoughts in this, did both, surprised and confused me. There was something in me that I strived for but never got. These were, and this created the title:
Great Expectations.
A few days ago I finished the written part of my bachelor thesis at university. Sign by sign I have approached my goal and with every other word everything, that was missing, was burned further and further into my mind. Sure, there was time pressure. Not so high that long nights of work were needed, but it was there.
The head becomes fuller and fuller and anything that could somehow shift the focus is suppressed. Paragraphs, layouts, print times, summaries, data packages, appointments and all that are omnipresent.
The more I wrote and worked, the more I realized how high I had set the goals and how many stones I put in my own way. More assignments and projects here, short deadlines there and a concept of features that may or may not be beyond the scope of a regular thesis. The more I wrote, the more I felt I needed to write more, formulating all the other thoughts that were buzzing around in my head. Unpronounced and unintentional, which I let never come to light.
The closer I came to the end, the more was in my mind what I just wanted to put into words and write on paper.
Now I can do that and I can write whatever whirles through my mind and I realize one thing:
I had the expectation, that after all the obligatory tasks and appointments, I would experience an exhilaration of satisfaction and success. The possibility of having an open world in front of me and being able to do as well as daily commitments, whatever I wanted.
Suddenly something fell away. The daily expectation to myself „You have to do something now and also as often as you can to complete all your stuff“.
How do you deal with it, when you are used to putting daily work into something that is suddenly gone? Instead of satisfaction and success there was a kind of helplessness and yes, fear. Fear of falling into the opposite now and no longer finding that focus at later important times. Putting my laptop in the corner and leave it there as long as possible? Only tiny projects on the side to slowly get used to it?
I deliberately do not describe on what exactly one of my working weeks consisted of and why I felt this graduation phase as an enormously intense and overwhelming one.
It’s a poor comparison, but what are people doing, who retire after 50 years of work? I still can not understand the mental maturity and the state of mind and the well-matured wisdom at this age, and therefore the handling of this end of a section may well be quite different from what I can now imagine. However, I can not help me to realize, that the situation is the same, regardless of time.
A period of habitual branding, and we humans are truly habit driven individuals, passes by and suddenly expects someone to live a completely different life. I have already experienced many colleagues and acquaintances who were not too far from entering the retirement age, who talked about it in high tones when they finally retire and never have to work again. An expectation beyond compare. Can a life fulfill that? Which life could fulfill that? How does the partner manage this, if you only see each other in the morning and in the evening and suddenly there is someone else all day long. Completely new situations open up and this can take both, positive and negative ones.
Do not ask yourself the question of the truth in this lines, correctness and meaningfulness behind what I write and do not think what I can know at 27 years. These are my thoughts that settle here and no deterministic teachings or well proven causal relationships I want to show here.
It is more of a thought game between what I am doing and the expectation for a time after certain works done.
I project this onto situations, that most of us expect and philosophize about the expectations and their fulfillments, which are perhaps too utopian even in the beginning. The longer the time frame in which an individual works or waits for something, the more we raise our expectations until we finally get what we want. At some point, there is always the point that they are just getting too big for anything, or anyone, to fulfill.
This is where frustration can begin when an expectation is not met. Expectations are like the seedling of a plant. How they nourish and nurture and nurture and they get bigger and bigger and you do not notice it at all. When you see these plants every day, you only realize that one day you want to change their place, how big and heavy they have become, and this is usually much more than expected. How could you achieve the you imagined for so long.
The fulfillment of the expectation and what happens after reaching the big milestone is, in my opinion, in principle impossible to achieve. I say it’s even impossible and yet I even encourage them to myself, and I’ve often had to realize that the outcome of a certain milestone did not bring the satisfaction I promised to myself. At the same time, I am getting to a state that I am actually concerned with.
On the way, to the ultimate goal, a completion or otherwise, is the longing for the supposed satisfaction following the project ubiquitous and the biggest motivator in my opinion. And yet the fulfillment of an expectation begins exactly where you begin to work towards it. Every second you continue to work towards the goal, it is worth being enjoyed and a much bigger part of the satisfaction you’re looking for than the promising ending.
A quote that I’m often repeating and is present in almost every area of our lives like no other is, I think, the following: It is from John Lennon, co-founder of The Beatles:
“Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.“
It is too easy to forget that every day in this world is part of our life and makes us become what defines us. No matter what it is filled with: work, sleep, fun, sadness, passion, joy, boredom, neutrality, bliss, all this is life and makes us grow.
Basically, it’s not about expectations and deals and all those milestones. On the contrary, I would like to express what moments we miss on the way to fulfilling these expectations. Which we omit and ignore in order not to lose sight of the goal. Moments that could distract us and throw us off track.
Imagine the way to the destination as two highways. One leads through an everlasting tunnel. Dark, cold, open in only a few places and daylight falls through, so special moments and possibilities become visible. As visible as they are, they are just as fleeting. The small section in the tunnel is not enough to really savor and enjoy with full awareness.
Such a tunnel is a safe way, dry, weather-resistant, secured. But also sad, one-sided and ostracizing.
The other highway is under the free sky. Endless expanses, the shelteringly intimidating atmosphere of forests, sights and great views are opening up.
Use it! Drive the freeway and not the tunnel! Goals are made to reach them, that’s for sure. But there is not just one goal, there are 100. There are 1000, there are countless ones. There can always be one overriding task, one that is most important or even most urgent. This may also take a very high priority in everyday life, but there must be moments when it is not, and not at all.
Everyone has to recognize these moments for themselves. You have to be able to identify them when they are in front of you and not when your shadow is just passing by.
You have to create conscious moments to be able to create these moments in the first place. Just like the highway in the open air — Here you can consciously choose a descent to discover something, to see, to experience what you might have noticed in passing. The nice thing is, you can drive back on the freeway at any time. So you always move towards the goal.
When you’re using such departures you’re setting other foundations for the higher goal. At first you might not recognize them as such. But they are at least as important if not most important in achieving the goal in its most balanced and rewarding manner.
Such descents can wonderfully offer a wealth of new thoughts, feelings, experiences and inspirations. A veritable wealth of new ideas and flashes of inspiration. Exactly these make works become masterpieces and much more. If you work a little too long with a task, it helps to gain a little distance and to give yourself and your mind a little break. This can take care of your soul and your inner peace and reconcile with itself a little more.
Even difficult tasks and problems with fresh thoughts can be child’s play.
Just like on the highway, people like to rest from time to time to stretch, to breathe fresh air and to make a difference. Even for short breaks, power can be harnessed for several miles.
I would like to reiterate that all these words have just gathered in my head and I try to arrange them in the flow of writing and give my thoughts a comprehensible meaning. There follows no counselor, no spiritual science, no script or something like that, according to which it applies to life. I reflect. I reflect on an important part of my life and recognize more and more how well it can be to write. I am someone who thinks, thinks a lot, thinks all the time. In my projects and work, I have always found this to be an advantage or even an ability. For me and my personal time, however, I recognize it more and more than, yes, as a blockade. Constantly thinking of alternatives to upcoming situations, and thus to the future, is certainly something that makes us humans one of the most advanced species we have yet encountered in our universe. However, just this in our time, full of dates, deadlines, rules, dangers, successes, and all these things can lead to tormenting and anxious thoughts. Thus, I personally realize more and more that writing down these thoughts cleans my head and thus my thoughts in a very specific way. It’s not just about bad, depressing or tormenting, or just about positive, good and flourishing thoughts. No, it’s about too many thoughts. Too much for a head, too much for a day and too much to achieve a certain focus on certain things.
There are so many things that stand in our way in this world and can be put at our feet. We should try that we ourselves are none of these things or will be. We should not stand in our own way and put our own stones in the way.
To reach the end, it remains for me to say that in the phase I just described, I have put such things on my own path and now I am busy getting them out of the way. I took a lot of tunnels and did not drive much under the open sky. The plant of my expectations was so heavy and big in the end that I could not move it and could not take it anywhere.
Our motivations and priorities shift from time to time and that’s a good thing. That’s what is important to live a balanced and fulfilling life and be in peace and harmony with yourself.
Some things always have to be done wrong or with mistakes in order to make them all better and greater later.
For me, in the future, I will ride as often as I can under the open sky with a big smile and open eyes and take as many exits as I can. I will watch and move my plant of expectations as often as possible to never turn it into a ghost, I can not reach anymore.
A final résumé from this period of life for me is, as Anthony Hopkins formulated so wisely one time:
“Carry your heart on the tongue…“
