Managing Expectations

 It isn't usual weather for October, and I expect the snow to come down soon. I still feel the crispness of leaves against the ground, and feel a strange nostalgia to hear them and feel them as well. It almost makes me want to bottle the crispness and color of the leaves, as Ray Bradbury suggests we could potentially do in his short story "Dandelion Wine". I try a new Chinese restaurant in the mid town area with my close friend Judy. I enjoy the food, but quickly realize that somehow the method of cooking must be of a slower kind.
    I had this thought after the study group and dinner today. My thought is about how we manage expectations of others around us. In the Buddhist class, we talked about 'instant repentance' as being not taking others to be separate from the mind. There are different ways to look at this, but one such way is to see that the perceptions I have of other people are really my perceptions. There is no way for me to quite get to someone else except through the mediation of perceptions. From what I have read in Chan, there aren't these separate discrete beings called self and other, because there is this constant, flowing interconnection of conditions and information happening all the time. For me to say that this is 'mine' and that is 'yours' is at times to overlook the way there is a constant interconnection between me and you. The terms of 'me' and 'you' are continually shifting all the time.
   I will give an example of what I mean. I was once part of a hiking group where I had often tried to plan ahead of time what to say, how the conversation should go, and so on. In most cases, if not all, everything I expected or wanted to happen never went as I had planned. I ended up feeling deflated, because I wasn't able to simply take moment as it was. In my eagerness to make friends or learn about others, I overlooked the fact that what I 'planned' is just my own thinking, based on an idea of what 'doing my best' is supposed to mean. It has nothing to do with how things unfold in the context of being within that situation, with all its complex conditions. Later, I started to realize that hardly anything that happens in the present moment is governed by how I think or plan it. At best, what I plan is only a kind of resource that will help me steer a path or draw from old experiences that might have worked in some cases, in the past. But plans don't provide experiences that can be replicated. The same is true with expectations.
    I have often had some worries about not wanting to let other people down. When I was coordinating a workshop recently, I would occasionally judge how I was doing based on the feedback I had received from others. I learned how easily I go out to others to judge my work, and how afraid I was of letting others down or being seen in a negative light. But, as I reflected tonight, the only expectations I can or need to manage are the ones arising in the mind itself. It is not about imaginary expectations that might be happening to someone else 'out there', but more: what expectations do I face now about this situation I am in? Am I expecting perfection? Am I expecting others to overlook things I did, or recognize me more? Do I expect to be able to make others happy? It is only in examining these expectations that I see their basis in a kind of desire for me to be "okay", when only mind can say that mind is okay. Often, when I am afraid of others' reactions, I am really projecting my own reactions onto the situations around me. It is a reflection of the state of mind I am having. More tragic, I end up giving away mind's power to phenomena that have no power to reverse my fears.