I’ve recently had my expectations exceeded. Being amazed by something that suddenly appears is different from when you could’ve anticipated it, but didn’t dare. It was a Sunday going on 4pm when it happened. The sky was getting dark when we got outside, but I’d say that it was bright and excessively aqua if I were retelling this story to my future children. You know an expectation has been exceeded when you’re unable to speak afterwards; my sister and I were trying to process our new worldview within the 10 minutes it took to leave the place we’d been. Within that silence, I wanted to doubt that it had even happened. Because things like that do not happen.
Expectations are not beaten, and the world is managed by the lowest of them. They may move to the left or the right, but they never tend to leave the ground. Yet I’m here to say, in part, that good things can happen to you, the sort of good you’d be unwise to expect. Your high expectations can be met and exceeded, so long as you stop pretending they are low.
You need to own your wishful thinking and other unsavoury titles if you want to be positively surprised. There are two definitions of naive, both account for being out of touch with reality, but only one of them means that you are unsafe. One is about ‘being unwise’, and the other is about ‘being unaffected’. One believes in everything, while the other believes in what can be true, albeit rarely. You get to be this second one after spending some time being the first. We all begin as the first, and we all discover why it’s offensive to remain it after being disappointed, and why the disposition becomes an insult in later life.
The second kind of naivety is not about getting back on the horse, it is about getting back on a horse, and going on with the journey. What it also isn’t is setting off on foot, before inevitably giving up entirely. The journey to the very best is too long to go about it half-heartedly. You need to find a horse again– a broken in, more refined horse. But the effort to rediscover hope can feel humiliating before it starts to feel pointless, with less of our wonder and curiosity about life helping the hunt.
We are mostly in the process of giving up in our teenage years. Some people are younger. Only 28% of seven to ten-year-old girls currently describe themselves as happy, while it’s 17% for seven to 21-year-olds. The number of UK adults who consider themselves satisfied has fallen in the background. Our dissatisfaction with life tends to be about other people– some of the discontentment in girls and young women is due to climate change, and what older people have done to the world, while just under half of the things medically associated with unhappiness concern our relationships with others. To be slighted by the failure of our expectations is to be slighted by others– people who meddle with things of ours and knock them out of place, people who hone our insecurities and what we consider ourselves deserving of. When we think about hoping again, it is other people that must be pardoned first. On the other side of that forgiveness is not settling for the less you’ve been shown, nor is it entirely disregarding it. It is adamantly asking for perfection still, having first challenged your perceptions.
On the Sunday that my breath was taken away, it was other people who took it. It was people being more than what is usual, and it was not that they were pure, nor that their imperfections were deceitfully hidden, it was partially my tolerance for the odd blemish. There are two definitions of idealism, and only one involves the definition of an ideal. Only one talks of ‘satisfying one’s own conception of what is perfect’, and only one encourages you to be both ambitious and wise. My high expectations are based on the real world, but on a different reality to the one I have lived. They are associated with higher ground, and the people who live on it. It takes some time to get there. Much of the agony of hope is how long you have to remain in it. But all of the joy in having an expectation exceeded is the hope that it gives.
-Abbie