Expectations

“I envisioned waking up in the morning and watching the sun rise on the porch but Hawaii is different than I imagined,” my daughter said to me a few nights ago. She was still having a great time but it seemed…well…different. She quite candidly admitted that her expectations were not being met but that she was having a great time. I mean, it’s Hawaii. It’s tough to have a bad time in Hawaii.

This was the first time that I thought deeply about how humans expect things and then are inevitably disillusioned if they actually get those things.

I’ve come to realize that expectations and reality don’t line up—and that’s completely normal.

That little moment stuck with me because it’s such a clear example of something that happens all the time, especially with bigger things like having children or building a certain kind of life. So much of what I once expected came from scattered images, like movies, social media, random daydreams, stories I told myself, and such, rather than anything solid or real. Those fragments created these vivid pictures in my head, and when life didn’t match them, it caught me off guard. For a while, that mismatch made me feel disappointed, like something was wrong with me or with what I had. Was the success that I achieved not the “real” success I was aiming at before, since it didn’t feel like the reality matched the expectation?

Over time I’ve come to see that there’s nothing broken about reality and nothing wrong with the expectations themselves. They just rarely line up perfectly. Expecting a future that feels exactly the way I imagined it is a bit like believing in unicorns or dragons—beautiful in theory, but not how the world actually works.

These days, I try to keep my expectations simpler and looser. Instead of clinging to a detailed script, I focus on the broader good stuff: connection, moments of joy, feeling alive. I’ve learned to let go of the need for everything to look a certain way.

The biggest thing I’ve taken from all of this is gratitude. Life moves so fast, and the present moment is really all we have. When I stop measuring it against some old mental picture of “how it was supposed to be,” I can actually be here for that moment—fully, openly, gratefully. That shift has brought me more peace and fulfillment than any perfect sunrise ever could.

The Patriarch