Expect nothing. Appreciate everything.

Learning to manage one’s expectations can be a challenge. I know it is for me. How can one be devoid of expectations, which is about hopes, dreams, and desires? When one thinks about it from this philosophical view, it is, in a sense, negating all of the positive thoughts that one is supposed to have about each day and about our lives. 

The one area of my life in which this mantra keeps me sane is in my career as a writer. As a professional writer and one who writes novels, rejection is a common experience that one has to bear daily. There is the constant struggle when one is at work on a book, the daily ups and downs of the writing process itself when inspiration is the lightning bug you’re forever trying to capture. 

The moments or perhaps the few lines that have taken you four or five hours to write may be the only thing that enables you to sit down the next day and the day after that. See, if one is thinking about writing a best seller or a book that wins all of the prestigious  awards, well, you can see how that may not be the best motivation given how elusive all of that is for all writers. Then there are the mountain of rejections one faces when trying to get published. Therefore, to stay sane and to continue to write, one has to write because of one’s love of the process of the work itself and not the expectations of what could happen once a book is finished. 

So, each time I sit down with the blank page in front of me, I have to remind myself to expect nothing and appreciate everything, knowing that ‘everything’ is the tiny moments or tiny successes. Perhaps it is a result of this mantra keeping me sane as a writer that trying to apply this to my daily life wasn’t that big of a leap, or one would think. Yet, like everyone else, I am human and human nature is prone to living with expectations. What I’ve come to learn is learning to manage one’s expectations is as important as anything else. As I write this blithely, please know that this is something that I am still working on each and every day. All I can say is that the most memorable times or moments have been when I’ve tried to not succumb to all of those wishful thoughts. When I show up just open to allowing whatever will happen to happen, I am never disappointed by how much more I get than I could have dreamed.