Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about expectations. So in daily life, it's totally natural and really useful to have a certain amount of expectation. You know, when we're meeting a friend for lunch, we expect them to turn up at the agreed upon time, or waiting for our train, we anticipate it will be there at least roughly when we expect it to arrive and that's completely reasonable and really useful. But a problem does arise when our expectations become really rigid and inflexible.

When that's the case, we can become very, very easily irritated, disappointed, and frustration any time things don't go the way we thought they would. This is a recipe for unnecessary suffering. For instance, really simple example. Just imagine that your partner pretty much always comes home from work at 6:00 PM. And one day you decide to make a special dinner for them.

But this particular day, they decided to catch up with a friend after work and they don't come home until 8:00 PM. If you stay fixed to your expectations of what you thought would happen, your plans, you might end up really irritated, disappointed, or even angry. But if you simply acknowledge things didn't go the way you thought they would, then you can just go with the flow. You might even be delighted to enjoy your nice meal and some time to yourself that night. Your experience of that evening can be completely different, either quite negative or quite enjoyable, depending on if you can let go of expectations.

So a lot of the time we also have unconscious expectations that we get really attached to. For instance, we expect people to behave roughly the way they always do. We expect things to go the way we plan them to. We have expectations about being able to do our usual routines. And so a lot of the time when they change, we feel really put out.

So of course, as I said, while it's really helpful to have an idea of where you're going, mindfulness actually really invites us not to form rigid ideas about how things should go, how things should be. Instead, the invitation is to meet whatever arises in the present moment with openness and acceptance, rather than really needing it to conform to our desires. In the words of Bruce Lee, we want to be like water, to be fluid and light on our feet, adapting to things as they arrive in the moment and kind of flowing with the current of things. So this is the invitation for practice today and ongoing going, to be like water. Of course, keep making plans and following your path, but also letting go of your action expectations so that you can make room on your journey for the surprises, the pivots and all the twists and turns.

As always, thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And inviting you now to settle in for today's meditation.