How to navigate life when it doesn’t meet our expectations

TODAY DID not start how I expected. In fact, it started not meeting my expectations when I went to bed last night. In my mind, I was going to have an early night and then this morning I was going to get up early, as some of my family were leaving for work early, and that was a good excuse to make the most of the morning.

Instead it didn’t quite happen like that. When I went to bed, I got caught up with a couple of things, read a bit too long, then when I did finally turn the light out, my mind was still busy and it took me a while to fall asleep. Then for some reason this morning, when I woke up, instead of feeling rested and full of the joys, my head felt fuzzy and it ached – a bit like having a hangover but without the pleasure of the night before. My productive morning disappeared before my eyes.

I find that as I get older, this happens more and more; my mind will make plans and my body won’t do as it’s told. But in many ways, we find that in life, too. A lot of my conversations seem to focus on, what I describe as the ‘reality difference’. We imagine what is going to happen but then life has different ideas.

In itself, having a reality difference isn’t a problem but I’ll be honest with you, I used to struggle with it. For me, there was an expectation that if I imagined how something was going to be, that was how it was going to be, and not only did I believe I had control over that outcome, it was a problem if it didn’t work out that way. I’d feel frustrated, disappointed, stressed about it.

Our minds are amazing.

It’s fascinating that we can even imagine what is going to happen in the future, and that our imaginings are so real and life-like that we do believe that it could actually happen that way. Of course, sometimes it does, and this reinforces our belief that what we imagine is going to happen is a really good predictor of what will happen.

This is where we get caught up, because when it doesn’t happen in the way we expect, especially if it’s worse than we expect, we feel like we’ve lost out, that life is conspiring against us. We feel out of control.

However, when we start to remember that the future we imagined was just that, an imagined future, that it was never real and no amount of thinking or even planning could 100 per cent bring that imagining into reality, it enables us let go of it a little bit and focus on what is real.

Because what we start to see is that we are comparing reality with something we have, to all intents and purposes, made up in the privacy of our own minds and creating frustration, stress, or disappointment because it didn’t come true.

When we see what we are doing and focus on what is real, in other words the reality we are presented with in the moment we are in, we start to settle down, and the negative feelings we have naturally fall away, because there is no reason for them to be there. So whilst this morning may not have turnout out how I imagined, it enabled me to find some quiet, enjoy several cups of tea, before I then decided to write about it and share it with you.