As a child I used to love walking on beams, balancing, which eventually led me to log rolling. They used to float rafts of logs on the rivers and in the bays. Ha! I’m lucky to be alive actually. We recently encountered a log jam and my grown up brain went, good grief what was I thinking, that looks extremely dangerous! I have mom genes today and chronic anxiety, so naturally I imagined every possible horror story that could occur, head injury, being trapped beneath the logs, drowning, and likely hypothermia since the water is so cold.

Do not advise. It’s a death trap I tell ya, and often illegal. Somebody once said “there’s a special God for children,” meaning some of us are still alive due to nothing but the grace of God. All of us actually, if you want to get technical about it.

Life is like that sometimes, it’s a log roll balancing act between keeping your expectations low, (lower, lower yet, down a bit more) so you can protect yourself from disappointment and pain, but keeping in mind that if your expectations are always super low, your cognitive bias will kick in and expecting the worse will soon become your reality.

I enjoy the saying, “just expect the worst, and if any good thing happens, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.” The problem being if you’re only expecting the worse, that’s all you’re going to be able to see. The Bible says in Proverbs 23:7, “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he…” Proverbs 4:23 says, “Keep your heart with all vigilance; for from it flow the springs of life.“

Unfortunately a significant sign of life is going to be pain. If you try to avoid pain by protecting yourself from disappointment and always expecting the worse, you will also cut yourself off from things like joy. You will also be sure to bring “the worst” into your life more on account of that being all you are able to focus on.

I myself often walk this fine line between expecting nothing and conversely insisting that others behave in a somewhat sensible and civilized manner. LOL, let the record show that I detested President Bush, was not pleased with him at all, but I think he nailed it when he created the phrase, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”  That is a real thing. I fall prey to it sometimes, too. My expectations around those in positions of authority hovers somewhere around zero, most of the time. I often have to remind myself, it’s always possible they will do the right thing. They call it a “leap of faith” for a reason. Sometimes you have to take the risk and hope for the best. Sometimes people will rise to your expectations. Sometimes things have a way of working out.