Regarding Expectations

Dearest Reader,

I have noticed that disappointment is rarely caused by circumstance alone.

More often, it arrives escorted by expectation — carefully constructed, quietly defended, and seldom questioned. We expect days to feel a certain way. People to respond as we imagine they should. Effort to be noticed. Happiness to appear on schedule.

It is an exhausting business, this constant arranging of the future.

Expectation, I find, has very little to do with hope. Hope is patient. Expectation is demanding. One waits; the other insists. And it is usually expectation, not reality, that leaves people feeling short-changed.

There is a particular freedom that appears when one stops rehearsing outcomes. When a moment is allowed to be what it is — not improved, not interpreted, not compared to how it might have gone — it often becomes more tolerable. Occasionally, it even becomes pleasant.

Happiness, contrary to popular opinion, does not respond well to pursuit. It tends to arrive only after one has stopped setting conditions for its appearance.

I have seen it surface in unremarkable places — during conversations that went nowhere, afternoons that accomplished nothing, days that ended without resolution. It seems to prefer moments that were not tasked with carrying meaning.

Should you find yourself quietly dissatisfied, it may be worth asking not what is missing, but what you expected to be there.

One is often surprised by the answer.

Yours most sincerely,
Lady Staywell