What Are You Expecting?

What we expect, we experience.

This is a tricky, often aggravating, truth.

When a car broadsided my Miata years ago, I could swear I was not expecting it.  Nor was I expecting past illnesses, divorce, or particular job challenges. Let’s throw in that check that bounced last week—wasn’t expecting that, either.

Or was I?

That’s the trick.

As long as we confine ourselves to the realm of possibilities, everything we experience is, by definition, within the possibilities we define. Possibilities are limited to our imagination.

When we can lift ourselves to the realm of IMpossibilities, anything is possible.

It works something like this…

EXPECTING PROBLEMS is where many of us land after life has knocked us around a bit.  Perhaps for self-protection, we expect the worst, and life proves us right.

HOPING THERE WON’T BE PROBLEMS is the best many of us allow ourselves to expect, as if not having problems is a departure from the norm, and we hope we’ll defy the odds, if only briefly.

HOPING FOR MIRACLES often comes in moments of desperation, when we cannot imagine a good outcome. At this stage, we cross into the realm of IMpossibilities, rationalizing that events beyond our understanding or imagination can occur.

EXPECTING MIRACLES assumes that because events beyond our understanding or imagination can occur, they usually do occur.  In other words, miracles occur constantly, but are unseen or unknown because we are too attuned to the problems we are expecting.

The reverse is true, too:  what we experience, we expect.

So, I have to ask you, have you ever experienced a miracle?  Has anything ever occurred that was beyond your imagination or rational explanation?  What IS a miracle, anyway?

I hope I didn’t mislead you, but I don’t really know the answer to these questions.  I do know we have to ask them.  By asking, we put ourselves on alert for miracles, and this is how we will experience them.  We have to seek if we are to find.

You have to expect something, why not a miracle?

FYI:  I am LOVING this collection of temporary tattoos.  They add fun and more awareness to my mindfulness practice.