Great Expectations...And Letting Them Go

Expectation is a funny thing. We form expectations of how this should be or how that should feel, thoughts about moments and experiences that have yet to come, experiences that are well into the future. It's impossible not to create some sort of vision of how things will turn out. Sometimes expectations are good. They can help us make decisions by imagining the outcome of one scenario or another. But they are bad when we are so tied to imaginary scenarios that when we finally arrive at "the moment" and it doesn't meet the irrational image we concocted, we are disappointed, stuck, resentful. 

This weekend we headed to the lake and friends joined us Saturday afternoon. Typically when we get together, it's fun with their two-year old (seriously one of the smartest, most entertaining tiny humans I've ever met) followed by food, games, and excellent, thoughtful, yet hysterical conversations. We jut click with them. It works. That was my vision. 

What we experienced was quite different. Hazel had a stomach bug earlier in the week and nary a sign had unearthed itself in either of her parents...until they arrived at the lakehouse. Poor Dan was a vomiting mess, Brook followed him around with a bucket of bleach while single-parenting a slightly cabin-fevered toddler, and said toddler seemed confused throughout the whole thing. No games, not many conversations and overall, not a relaxing endeavor.

At the time if felt like a disaster. Some sort of unfair failure of a weekend. But here's the thing. Instead of playing Euchre with her parents, I got to play games with Hazel, who in her young little brain somehow found something in me that I wasn't sure I had...some sort of Toddler Understanding System. We clicked. It was fun. It was exhausting. And yeah, it didn't meet my expectation of wine and peaceful moments gazing across the lake, but it was still an experience that is part of me, and maybe part of her.

And more than anything, it was a lesson in learning to release those expectations when they aren't fully realized. Let them go so that when you are actually in that moment you so vividly pictured, you can adjust to the actual reality and enjoy it no matter what it looks like.