Jean-Baptiste Oudry:
Quizzical Bird; verso: blank (18th century)

"You might not ever be the master of your fate …"

I began my rounds confident that my mission would fail, for I had declared the unlikelihood of success as a part of my mission statement. I complained that the likelihood of finding Giblets here, so near the end of every supply chain, would very likely be tiny. Instead, I insisted upon eventual failure to maintain my haughty worldview that I would be suffering, doing without, nobly bereft. Imagine my surprise when I found my Giblets on my first stop! I'd imagined a course that would take me from shop to shop, allocating a couple of hours to the effort. Immediate success spoiled my whole premise. I guess I should have felt delighted, but I was pissed instead. I came prepared to sacrifice, not succeed. Under those conditions, success sucked!

I had not thought about this very much before this fresh experience. I realize that expectations can serve as a helpful blessing or its opposite. The old adage that one should start with an end in mind misses this subtler point: it matters what sort of end one imagines, for expectations hold extraordinary power. They can curse their holder with the more nuanced aspects of anticipation. Expecting to lose might guarantee an unwanted outcome. Hoping to win might prove causative, if not wholly delusional. We've all seen them, the ones who've convinced themselves they're invulnerable. They seem incautious, careless, clueless, full of themselves. They might not always succeed, but they never appear in doubt of their prowess. At the same time, the more humble servant might perform more egolessly and thereby influence their fate, perhaps not nearly outrageous enough to believe or succeed.

I am more the latter player. I travel with one foot already in the preemptive ditch, not precisely expecting the worst but well aware of its potential and prepared for its arrival. I rarely engage as if my mission were a fait accompli. I always feel more lucky than skillful when I pull anything off. I had not considered how deeply my humility might have been affecting me. Of course, any accounting would find no particular relation between expectation and result. The above example does not demonstrate how my expectation of failure resulted in my failure, but quite the opposite. I expected to fail but quickly succeeded, thereby deeply disappointing myself. I had not accounted for surprise.

So what advice can I offer on the subject of Hexpectations other than to caution me and you to be careful what we wish for? I could speculate that what you do not wish for also matters. It might also matter how you expect to feel or, perhaps, none of any of that ever matters. The Laws of Attraction were most definitely fictional, a story concocted to simplify some of life's inherent complexity. Chance explains pretty much every convergence, the good as well as the bad and the ugly. I'd prefer that some skill was involved and, of course, that I was a master of that skill, and there is a skill involved, and it might even be possible to master it. How might one live in a universe that was never determined, where notions of personal agency and cause-and-effect relations were always provably bogus? Nobody's merely the sum of their choices. Nobody ever fully determined their course.

Get used to disappointment as well as delight, for this universe seems bound and determined to both disappoint and delight us. Which it does might ultimately be up to us. I didn't have to be disappointed when I found my Giblets on the first try. I might have felt surprised instead, but I was deeply invested in feeling disappointed. Disappointment might have been the whole purpose of the excursion. I set out to become a martyr but became a hero instead. What crueler fate has anyone ever insisted upon experiencing? I overstate my case. Be careful what you insist upon experiencing. You might not ever be the master of your fate, but you might always be the author of your reaction to it.

©2023 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #GoodNuff, #PureSchmaltz