Driving from Santa Barbara to Solvang Friday night on Hwy. 101.  What is usually a 30 minute drive took more than two hours.  During the entire drive, I marveled at the fact that one human being – a car jacker who went through three stolen cars along a 100-mile stretch of highway before being killed by police officers – caused so much chaos.

Expectation:  n 1: belief about (or mental picture of) the future [syn: outlook, prospect] 2: wishing with confidence of fulfillment [syn: anticipation] 3: the feeling that something is about to happen 4: the sum of the values of a random variable divided by the number of values [syn: arithmetic mean, first moment, expected value]

I have a hard time with this word.  Part of me has begun to see it as a dirty word, as something to be avoided, but another part of me believes it is necessary to live my life to the fullest and believe in all the greatest possibilities imaginable.  I try to be careful not to lean to heavily in one direction or another, but instead try to balance having expectations, particularly for myself, with letting go of them.  I realize that if I set expectations that are too high – or specific – for myself, others, the world, etc. I risk setting myself up for disappointment.  On the other hand, if I release all expectations, I feel like I risk settling for less than I want in life.  It can sometimes be a frustrating experience to keep my expectations in balance, but I know in my heart this is an important lesson for me to learn and continue working on.  Dealing with expectations is something that has been a part of my life for, well, my entire life.  The roots run deep, and I am trying to disentangle myself from them so I am not living my life according to old voices and patterns.

There are two sides of this issue for me, and I struggle with them both.  Expectations of myself and expectations of others.  Lately I have been putting a tremendous amount of pressure on myself to not only get a million things done, but get them done with perfect grace and composure.  Is it any wonder the majority of my girl pieces are of her on ballerina tippy-toes?  I have been thinking a lot about this over the past few days, of how I feel like I have to be 100% for everyone all the time.  Darling Pixie asked me recently how it would feel if I knew I was doing absolutely enough for our friendship, and I told her it would feel like a huge relief.  Why is it that I never feel like I am doing enough for the people I love?  I actually know the answer to that question, but knowing that comes from a dynamic in my life that I no longer need to subject myself to, I wonder how this feeling can continue to dig its clutches into my heart, making it difficult for me to rest easy in the notion that I am doing enough.

I am not a martyr, and I don’t have a hard time saying no when I need to.  I can set boundaries for myself and am pretty persnickity when it comes to filling up my calendar with commitments and social activities.  Still, I so often feel like I should be doing more.  What would happen if I didn’t do anything for anyone for an entire day?  A week?  A month?  What if I just gave myself a break for at least a little while and trusted that everyone would love me just as much and still be there no matter what?

I am trying to sit still with this thought, to sink deeper into trusting.  I so often talk the talk of how important it is to trust, yet when I shine a spotlight on my own behavior, I see very clearly how much work of my own I have to do in this area.  And so we come full circle, back to expectations, as I expect more of myself, that I should know better, that I should be wiser.  In this particular area, I am glad I have high expectations of myself, for it encourages me and pushes me to do the work I need to do to be in all of my relationships with a more open heart.  That is an expectation I can live with.

"Blessed is he who expects nothing for he shall never be disappointed."  -Alexander Pope