I remember an evening when I had been looking forward to a conversation because, for several days beforehand, I had already imagined what it would be like. Not down to the smallest detail, but clearly enough for a certain mood to have formed in my mind. I expected closeness, openness and that particular feeling of being understood. The conversation itself was friendly, honest and, in truth, perfectly fine. Even so, I went home afterwards with a slight sense of disappointment. It was only later that I realised the other person had hardly been given a fair chance to meet my expectation. They were not being measured against something real, but against an encounter that had already taken place in my imagination. That stayed with me because it showed me how easily expectations can get ahead of a moment and begin shaping it before it has even started.
For me, expectations are part of life. I can hardly plan, hope or look forward to something without forming some idea of what might happen. If I publish a book, I hope it will reach people. If I meet someone, previous experiences give me some sense of how the encounter might unfold. If I begin a new path, I usually have at least a rough idea of where I hope it will lead. So, for me, the problem is not that we have expectations. It becomes interesting when I forget that they are expectations. Then a possibility turns into an inner standard. What actually happens is no longer experienced on its own terms, but measured against whether it matches the picture I already had in mind.
Expectations can influence our perception far more strongly than I used to realise. If I expect someone not to take me seriously, I hear their words differently. A casual remark carries more weight, a longer silence feels like disinterest, and a moment of inattention suddenly seems to confirm what I had already suspected. The same can happen in the opposite direction. If I idealise someone, I am more likely to overlook things that do not fit the image I have of them. Our minds look for patterns and use previous experience to assess new situations. That is entirely human. But precisely because of that, I find it important to recognise that perception does not simply register what is there. It is also influenced by what it is already looking for.
The expectations we place on ourselves reach even deeper for me. They have often become so familiar that I barely recognise them as expectations at all. I should be further along by a certain age. I should respond more calmly. I ought to know by now what I want. If I have been dealing with a subject for this long, surely it should not still be difficult for me. Thoughts like these can create a peculiar pressure because they constantly compare my present experience with an imagined version of myself. Then I am not simply tired, uncertain or undecided. I am disappointed that I am still tired, uncertain or undecided at all. A state becomes a judgement. And that judgement does not necessarily come from the life I am actually living, but from an idea of what my life ought to look like.
I notice expectations particularly clearly where we silently assign roles to other people. We expect a certain kind of closeness from a partner, understanding from a friend, behaviour from our children that fits our ideas, or something from our parents that we may have been missing for a long time. Much of that is understandable. Relationships need reliability and mutual consideration. But I have experienced how quickly a legitimate wish can become an invisible contract that the other person knows nothing about. Then I am disappointed by something that was never actually spoken. The other person has not necessarily broken a promise, but my idea of what they ought to have done. Moments like these have shown me how closely expectation and disappointment can be linked. Not every disappointment arises because reality was bad. Sometimes it was simply different.
In my exploration of spirituality too, I have repeatedly experienced expectations as something very powerful. If I believe that a particular experience ought to appear in a certain way, I easily begin searching for exactly that. With Reiki, this might be warmth, tingling, inner calm or some other sensation. I have found in my own experience that such ideas can alter my attention. That does not mean a perception is therefore unreal. But there is a difference between experiencing something openly and inwardly checking whether the right thing is happening. This is one of the reasons it has become increasingly important to me to let an experience stand as it is at first. If I notice something, it is allowed to be there. If nothing remarkable happens, I do not have to turn that into a lack. That openness feels freer to me than constantly checking whether an experience matches my expectations.
Perhaps there is a larger question here that reaches far beyond individual situations. How much of our lives do we actually experience, and how much do we continuously compare with an inner design? We have expectations about what success should look like, how love ought to feel, when we should have arrived and what a fulfilled life should contain. Many of these images do not come entirely from within us. We absorb them from family, society, the media and the lives of other people. That does not automatically make them wrong. But if I no longer recognise where they came from, I can spend years trying to move closer to a life that may never truly have been mine. Then expectation becomes more than a way of looking towards the future. It becomes a quiet force that guides decisions, sorts our desires and even determines what I experience as success or failure.
This is exactly where I see a connection with I – Your Best Liar. While writing the book, I was deeply interested in how convincingly we can tell ourselves stories without consciously being untruthful. Expectations belong in that same territory for me. I can be entirely certain that I need something simply because it fits my idea of a good life. I can expect another person to change so that I can be happy. I can believe that a particular goal will finally give me the feeling I am missing today. Sometimes it is only when an expectation is not fulfilled that I realise I had not simply been hoping for something. I had already made my inner balance depend on it.
Today, I do not want to fight expectations or remove them from my life. They will come anyway. I still look forward to things, hope, plan and imagine possibilities. But I notice more quickly when an idea begins to turn into a demand on life. Then I become more interested again in the moment that is actually unfolding than in whether it lives up to my design. And every now and then, something emerges from that which I could never have planned. A conversation takes a different direction and becomes deeper because of it. A path does not lead where I intended to go and opens something I had not seen before. Perhaps there is a quiet freedom in that for me: not living without expectations, but leaving reality enough room to be different from the picture I had already formed of it.