Expectations vs. Possibility
Imagine yourself, as you are, only pregnant. You head to your OBGYN’s office and hear your baby’s heartbeat for the first time. Your eyes, filled with hope and awe as you embark on the wildness of this reality. Your thoughts are disrupted when asked if you’d like to know the sex of your child. Your body fills with warmth as you shout with every ounce of your being, “YES.”
A girl. A girl! I am creating life and she is in the form of a Queen!
As the days and months continue, they are filled with little pink outfits, designing the nursery, baby showers, conversations about her name, and contemplating what she will look and be like. And just like that, you’re in and out of labor. Now in your arms, you hold for the first time, your Queen. You look at her with every ounce of your being and hold her with every morsel of your heart, as now skin to skin you have your world - and for the first time it is right within your grasp.
Stamped with the name you’ve meticulously thought out, dressed with the outfit you’ve had laid out for months, and wrapped in the blanket that you hope she will keep close to her forever - she is ready to enter the life you have spent the last 10 months planning. Or is she?
Truth is, perhaps you’ve put this sweet little lady on a pedestal since the moment you began mapping out her initial existence. Assuming that she would mold into this world you have created for her, this expectation you have unwillingly asked her to fit into. But you don’t know her, you don’t know her hopes, her desires, her dreams, her interests, or her path, and at this point neither does she.
Simply put, there is a metaphor here within the confines of this analogy. It is perfectly wonderful to know the sex of your baby, but perhaps when we fill our desires with the knowledge of an answer, we lose appreciation for the magic. Likely, if we didn’t know the sex of our baby until the day they take their first breath, perhaps we wouldn’t be able to plan their life around who we believe they are. We wouldn’t be able to give them a name until we see their eyes and hear their story. We wouldn’t be able to decorate their home until we know who it belongs to. The same goes for us. If we knew all of our answers, we would diminish the magic of this thing called life that we are miraculously living. Less alive and more planned. More expectations and more room for disappointment.
Imagine you find out that you are having a girl. You plan for her, you create her world, and when she is born, the doctors give you a confused look as they share this wild reality: “Uh, She is actually a boy.” They had been reading the sonogram wrong for the entirety of your pregnancy. What if you have twins? What if. What if. What if. We will never know until it happens. This life that we are seeking answers to will continue to unravel and likely challenge our predetermined certainty.
Stoicism teaches us that we can’t control the things that happen to us, but we can control our reactions to them and we can control how we perceive them. If we suck the beauty and the magic of these moments, who and what will we have left?
What if we challenge ourselves to think less about “what if” and more about “I am.” When faced with the opportunity to prematurely decide the fate of something not within our control, can we step back and have the awareness to seek comfort in the unknowing? Trusting that there is bliss in unanswered question. “I am able to find comfort in discomfort; light in darkness; balance in instability.” Because I understand that, “what if” doesn’t define who, “I am” and where I am headed.
Love & Light