Expectation vs. Anticipation

Expectation gets me every time. It's my rigid adherence to a prescribed outcome. Expectation is seductive.

As my dad's mentor said to him in his first year of teaching voice,

Potential will break your heart;
You've got to focus on results.

In that equation, "potential" equals "expectation" for me; it's that expected outcome, the outcome you know can happen, will happen because you can just see it and taste it, must happen. And it breaks my heart every time. Or rather, I break my own heart over it.

Until today.

I'm arranging a Fundamentals of Shamanism course taught by my teachers, and over the ensuing weeks it's been like pulling teeth to get people to register for this thing. Several people over the months and years have expressed earnest interest, lots of interest, begging interest, and yet when it comes down to the wire they go silent, disappear into the woodwork, tell me that "things have come up".

Which of course I understand because, well, things do come up.

The two-day course costs less than $200. Way less if you'd registered earlier than this week.

Today, doing my Morning Pages, I had a lovely and easy revelation: it's time to get new friends, results-friends instead of potential-friends, and it's time to stop letting my expectations break my heart and instead move into the joy of anticipation.

It's time for me to forget about what I think this prize-winning rose that I'm growing and nurturing is going to look like, and instead focus on the miraculous process of the flowering. Watching a bud burst into flower in slow, everyday time makes it look to my eyes like a stately, orderly process. Time-lapse photography shows me something completely different: it's an explosive, chaotic event with lots of lurches and wiggly bits before the true grandeur of the finished flower erupts into this world.

The energy of anticipation is focusing on the process of the flowering rather than focusing on my limited idea of what the finished prize flower "should" be, must be for me to be happy. After all, they say, "the joy is in the journey" and not necessarily the achievement of its final destination.

Maybe the flowering of the art and practice of urban shamanism here in my town takes the form of a rare, shy, understory woodland flower rather than a showy and profuse inflorescence. And now, with that knowledge, maybe I can slow down my time sense enough to watch it wonderfully unfold in the way it was meant to be :-)

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