Expectations and Growth

At this stage in my life, what I spend time doing is up to me.  Probably more so than in any previous stage of my life.  Seeing the days roll on and developing expectations seem to be at odds with an adventuresome life.  If expectations can be seen as habits carried on so steadily that conditions can be depended upon, then what will be new in life?  Or is it more like this--you try an activity, and you enjoy it.   Having enjoyed it, you decide to do it more often.  if you succeed at that, then this enjoyable activity will occur on a regular basis, and your life will be enriched.  As you continue doing this thing on a regular basis, it will become a habit.  Will that habit become an old friend or will an activity once enjoyable become humdrum and no longer so?  Without some means of taking stock from time to time, I can see a time where it all slowly hardens into inertia and resistance to change, and the opposite of growth.  Inertia seems to hold some people back, to stop the growth means to begin to decay, doesn't it?

Expectations and Growth

I remember some years ago taking note of the crowds of old men at McDonald's early in the morning.   I assumed it was the bottomless senior coffees they could have there.  Some in the crowd would laugh and talk, but others looked so bored, the coffee seemed the only thing keeping them from falling back to sleep.  How will I spend my time then, I reflected?

It all sounds negative as I read it over, but my sense is that taking stock and making changes in those activities is the best means to live.  To be alive is to grow and to change.  Expectations about how you spend your time are not the only expectations we build into our lives.  The people we choose to spend time with influence us as well.  I recently had a conversation with a friend in which we lamented the absence of a good conversation about things that are meaningful and larger than the routines about weather, who you have seen lately, what they are up to, TV, politics and blah, blah, blah.  We decided to try collecting some topics for the much larger conversations around ideas and ideals that we seem to have stopped having, and make room for such discussions periodically on a more formal basis.  In this way, we might just do a little more thinking, instead of just reshuffling the deck of old cards in our deck, so to speak.

Since then I have thought only momentarily about it, and haven't fastened on an idea that jumps out at me.  I think I'll go see about Lifelong Learning projects around here and maybe some of the old Great Books projects, but maybe I'm just being perfectionistic about it.  Any old idea can be a start.  The habit we want to establish is growth and change, so most anything we try will work.  The habit that got us there was one of taking stock of what we are up to these days.  So self-awareness and growth look like a couple of habits that put a more positive and optimistic perspective on life as we know it.

I know, it's all sort of dull and boring, but it's helped me sort out a few things.