What You See Is What You Get

    Charmaine said she writes the Daily Prism so she doesn’t rip off her clothes and run screaming down the street.  I read it I don’t succumb to the occasional urge to poke out my eye with a stick. We need reminders of the good that is in our lives and the good that we are capable of, at least I do. The way I see the world shapes my life.  I don’t know why that’s true. I do know that the good in our world becomes more evident to me when I look for it.

     

When I don’t see the good in life it’s not because it’s M.I.A. or because my eye sight is suddenly worse. The good is always there because love is always there in one form or another. Love exists rather we see it or not.  If I don’t see the good in a situation it’s often as not because my expectations have gotten in the way.  You might know expectations as ‘shoulds’, what should happen, what she should say, what he shouldn’t say, what they should do.

I started keeping a mental tally of the expectations I saw in my life recently and was embarrassed at how self serving they were.  There wasn’t room for anyone else in my small minded mandates for the world. There also wasn’t any room for synchronicity which is a complete and total bummer because I love the grace note of it in my life. However, those were things I could put on the back burner. Having a good time isn’t, not when you are a teacher on vacation.  

When I noticed that my expectations were getting in the way of having a good time at a jam last week I was not happy.  Drastic measures were called for in my mind.  I gave it a half a minute of thought then did the first thing that popped into my head.   I lowered my expectations a bit and I kept lowering them until I was back in the moment where expectations can’t exist and I was having a good time again.  A wise woman knows her priorities. The only thing that changed was how I looked at the world I was living in at the moment and without expectations it was all good. It usually is.