Never What You Think It Is

You antic­i­pate your first day at school. You mark it on the cal­en­dar. When you finally get there — even if it is pre-kindergarten — you are a lit­tle baf­fled and usu­ally dis­ap­pointed. You are just another child in a room­ful of com­peti­tors (com­pet­ing for the atten­tion of the teacher and for more than your share of snacks). By the time you get home, you have some excit­ing sto­ries to tell, but mostly you are tired and won­der­ing what the big deal was. There it is, the cal­en­dar of antic­i­pa­tion. You abruptly stop mark­ing off the days.
Every event and life tran­si­tion after that car­ries the same dynamic. Noth­ing is exactly what we thought it would be. Some­times it was bet­ter — some­times worse — but never exactly what we thought it would be. The imag­i­na­tion does the best that it can to pre­pare us. It has lim­i­ta­tions. The key to going from dis­ap­point­ment to accep­tance has to do with admit­ting our own illu­sions. We set our­selves up for the fall. We then take full respon­si­bil­ity for see­ing things the way they are.
Whin­ing is when a per­son is stuck in his or her own illu­sions and insists on pre­fer­ring them to real­ity. (Ever order some­thing from a cat­a­logue or off the shop­ping net­work and notice that it is smaller and cheaper than the way it first appeared?) Matu­rity is pretty matter-of-fact. With it comes mod­i­fied expec­ta­tions and the abil­ity to quickly get to the bot­tom line. It is not a killjoy. In fact, it is just the oppo­site. It embraces what­ever joy is in the event, and does not have to com­pen­sate for self-generated illu­sions.
San­ity is about going with “what is” instead of “what we thought it would be.” San­ity is rel­a­tively opti­mistic and extremely flex­i­ble. It makes allowances for unfore­seen dis­ap­point­ments, but it never gives way to pes­simism or cyn­i­cism. If you want to test your abil­i­ties on this one, take a walk through a children’s hos­pi­tal. There you will be tempted to despair of life itself — except for the atti­tudes of the chil­dren them­selves. Some­how they go with what­ever is. Their abil­ity to trust sees them through the impos­si­ble. Not hav­ing a clue of what to expect can be a real blessing.