Expectations are overrated

For months before my family’s summer Europe trip, my mom did obscene amounts of research and planning to make this trip the best it could be. Countless hours of online planning ruled out any and all possibility in our minds of anything going wrong.
This was going to be the trip of a lifetime.
The day after we arrived in Paris, my mom was pickpocketed in the subway system. I didn’t see it happen: the girl just got on the train, unzipped my mom’s purse, slyly swiped her wallet and was gone.
We were duped by a professional thief, and as a result my mother had to spend the next two hours and $200 to cancel all of her credit cards.
A few days later we took a ferry across the English Channel to Portsmouth. My brother and his wife had been sick for the whole trip, and it was only getting worse; their coughing and hacking was keeping them up all night.
So we decided to get some help for them. We went to a medical dispensary in Portsmouth and asked if we could get some medicine for them.
But what we got was more than we bargained for.
Suspecting they had swine flu, the doctors and nurses quarantined all of us in a hospital room for the next six hours, only paying occasional visits while covered from head to toe in blue aprons and face masks like some sort of hazmat team coming to eradicate radioactive material.
The mood was just a little awkward in that hospital room.
It turned out that this was just the beginning: after we were kicked out of our own pre-paid hotel room, cheated out of our pre-paid car and missed half of our $500 tour, I finally dubbed the vacation the “trip of plan B.”
I thought to myself, ‘Why was everything going wrong? What happened to our picture perfect trip?’
Well, after some inward Zen-like contemplation, I came to the conclusion that nothing went wrong – I was just looking for the wrong things.
It’s like the time I chomped down on what looked like an M&M and surprisingly got the fruity, chewy taste of a Skittle instead of the crunch of candy-coated chocolate; it doesn’t taste bad, it just isn’t what I expected.
The problem with my Europe trip was I expected everything to go as planned, and as such, I expected too much.
I wanted the trip of a lifetime, and I got it – just in a little different way than I expected.
See, for the most part, I think expectations are overrated, in more ways than one. I have always been told to “reach for the stars” and “shoot the moon.” But why can’t I just be content with “reaching” for my daily bowl of cereal, or “shooting the moon” in a game of Hearts with my friends?
Because, as I’ve discovered the hard way, shooting the moon isn’t always in the cards.
Some expectations are unrealistic and lower our appreciation of what is going on around us every moment of every day.
So now, I don’t expect my group members to get their work done, don’t expect my friend who is always late to get to a place on time, don’t expect myself to get an 8 or 9 on my first English essay of the year.
And do you know what the result is?
Now in everything I do, I always either meet or exceed my expectations.
And I love it.
So as I go into this year, I expect there to be mistakes in this newspaper: I expect there to be some biased stories, expect there to be spelling errors, expect there to be flaws. But I also expect everything will work itself out.
What I can promise you is that I and the entire Gazette staff will do all we can to make this a first-class newspaper.
Life happens, mistakes happen; we might as well enjoy them.