After spending most of the day nursing an acute sense of failure, it suddenly occurred to me that I had only the vaguest idea of what it was I was failing at. Initial investigations into the subject pointed to some pretty grandiose visions, so naturally I assumed that if I could just get my expectations out in the open, we could all have a good laugh and I could go home. I began listing them as they came to me. I, Ellen, expect myself to:
- Develop a deep understanding of the human condition
- Learn about what various cultures, religions, and philosophers have made of it
- Note the physical and material effects those ideas had/are having on the world
- Read all the books, see all the art, listen to all the music, and learn about the ideas and cultures that birthed them
- Really see the culture I grew up in (20th-21st century American/Pacific Northwest/Seventh-day Adventist/Suzuki method/classical music), understand what contributed to it historically, and recognize how I have been shaped by it
- Fully synthesize/digest/process all of the above information, hold it in my heart and mind, and respond sensitively and creatively and in a way that only I can or will.
This should sound impossible, if not for any one human, then at least specifically for me. I’ve read books which pertain to these topics, but my brain seems incapable of retaining such information. I could not tell you today what the main takeaways of those books were, so to think that I could amass the amount of knowledge described above is laughable.
Yet I must confess that, when I read over the list, I get really excited. The impossibility of it doesn’t scare me off, for some reason. One can imagine that all artists, philosophers, and scientists have felt similarly called out beyond themselves. They stretched and gave us the world we have today.
I’d expected to discover that my expectations had been heaped upon me by society, and that simply naming them would rob them of their power over me. I thought I would look at them and say, “Ha! Patriarchy much?” Or, “Ha! Puritanical work ethic much?” But instead, I discovered that I quite like my expectations for myself. I am beginning to wonder if they might actually be desires, not expectations.
What is funny about all of this is that something like 0.5% of my daily life is spent pursuing these goals, so I’m not actually failing because I’m not actually trying. Maybe the desire is to understand, to synthesize, to respond, and the expectation is to try. I do think I might have picked that one up somewhere.