Expectations

My good friend FoxyJ wrote a wonderful post about expectations. She is an amazing person and it was a great post. It's one of the things we're dealing with right now. I can't tell you how excited we were to take Little E to the Oregon coast in June and show her the tide pools. I've been dying to go to the zoo and show her all of the animals. And I'd already looked into the schedules at the Bean Museum to take her to the children's presentations. None of that is possible for at least 2 years now.

The good thing is that at 7 months, she won't care about tide pools and won't really look at the lions or polar bears. She won't know the difference between the taxidermy animals at the Bean Museum and the stuffed moose that Macey's gave her yesterday. I could throw sand in the back yard and then spray her with the hose and she'd be as happy as at the beach. She has no expectations and won't be missing out on a thing. It's only us who are missing out. It's a consolation that she really won't care. But as FoxyJ said, crushed expectations can be hard. We'll go and do in 2 years. We're not losing anything really. I had a teacher once who wasn't religious, but looking back she was very Buddhist in her thought. She once told me that the source of all pain is expecting and not accepting. That's basically the first pillar of Buddhism. And as Wesley said, "Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something." It's probably appropriate to contemplate some of the Buddhist teachings as Evelyn often looks like the Mahayana images of the laughing Buddha. I'm sure you've seen them, they are the big fat Buddhas with the belly hanging out. Supposedly if you rub the belly it is good luck. Well, her belly sure hangs out sometimes (especially when they put a little t-shirt on her yesterday that didn't quite fit.) If you rubbed her belly she laughed and that's got to be good luck, right?