Past Expectations

When we are children, our minds use to flow over with hopes and dreams of a glorious future. People around us, too, set faith and expectations in us to achieve great things once we’ll have grown up. We practice our innate talents, improve our skills, and broaden our knowledge. Little by little we grow out of the restrictions of childhood and get ready to occupy the adult world. Then we stand on our own feet and we trust in our power to make come true everything that we wish for. We choose a career. We start a family. We get about building the life that best matches our wishes and abilities.

We pick the rut that promises us the freedom to fulfil the desires of our young selves. At first, we are full of enthusiasm, working on the great future that we imagine to be destined for us, but it doesn’t take long and we realize that we need to make compromises on our way. We can’t always have exactly what we want! We could change direction to steer for our initial goals, but it’s easier to continue on the rut and to put up with a slight variation of our plans. It doesn’t make our lives less enjoyable, only more comfortable and more predictable. The security of the rut lulls us.

So year after year we follow the same old rut and the goals of our early years recede into the background ever more. Then comes the day when we make a balance of what we have achieved. We are having good lives, satisfying lives, and fulfilled lives. We could be happy, and yet, there’s something in us that pushes us forward, that wants more. It doesn’t matter that we achieved much that we had aimed at. We have met many expectations that family and friends had set in us. We have even met the greater part of our own expectations in us, but they are past expectations. Now we're only supposed to continue as ever.

We have new hopes and dreams although life has taught us to be humble. It’s better to take things easy, to make a compromise. We use our free time to sit down and write. At last we pen the stories that have been buried in our souls all the while. We realize that we have been too busy and too settled to hear them call out to us. Now we want to share them with the world and do our best to have them published. However, we are no longer children who believe that the world is only waiting for us to come out. We’re realistic about the future and we’re past esaggerated expectations - our own and those of others.

Hope, however, never dies. The future is ours!