Instruments of Seduction - Norman Rush

Norman Rush - October 24, 1933

Expectations---

I’ve sat on writing about this story for sometime now. I simply didn’t know what it was try to tell me.

Until this morning…

As the seductress in Rush’s story expected certain things from the men that she seduced I find myself all too often living my life expecting things from…well…life.

I feel that expecting things from life sets you up for disappointment.

We expect to find a job after college.

We expect to earn good money at that job because of our degree.

We expect that with our success, we will find a mate.

We expect that with that mate we will start a family.

We expect that family to run like a well oiled machine.

We expect that with a successful job, stable home life that our future can only be bright and rosy.

And sometimes, this causes us to never expect bad things to befall us.

But if we don’t expect certain things, does that force us to live a life of mediocrity or force us to not strive to greater heights? Do we just accept the ebb and flow of life and let the often rising waters of “bad things” drown us? Do we accept what happens to us as fate?

I think I need to find a happy medium between expectations and the unseen hand of “life”.

I knew that after my son was born that the majority of control that I like to have over my life would disappear. He would throw so many variables into the equations of events that it would be impossible for me to calculate how I could exert my control over events.

I am still learning to let go of some of that control and let go of expectations.

In the case of his birth, the expectations I envisioned of my life after his birth have been exceeded.

I never could have imagined the range of emotions that have saturated my life over these past three months.

So as I continue to live, and as I raise my son, I will learn, and he will in turn, unknowingly teach me how to flow within this world.