All I thought I wanted was a quiet day
Thanks to the inadvertent coincidence of two home improvement projects, my house has been an active construction site for four straight months with no end in sight. Construction sites are, of course, loud and messy and can feel more than a little chaotic if you’re living rather than working in one. None of these attributes plays to any of my strengths as I am, by nature, quiet, neat, and orderly.
During these months I have had many moments when all I yearned for was to have the house to myself. To have a quiet hour or two to write or think or take a shower without the threat of being needed to answer a question. On Monday, I was surprised by even more than this. I had an entire day without a single worker.
Yet rather than stretching out into the quiet and calm, I found myself at wits end. “Where are they?” I wondered one thousand times. I rushed upstairs to change clothes positive that they would arrive as soon as I was indecent. When a friend came over to take a walk, I asked her to leave her car down the street to leave room for the vans and trucks that usually make my driveway impassable. Somehow, I felt frustrated and flummoxed for most of this surprisingly chaos-free day.
Hopes and expectations
What on earth happened? While my hopes for an oasis of quiet came to pass, my expectations for the day – for the hustle and bustle that, while bothersome, signify progress on our project – did not. I never managed to make peace with (let alone stretch out into) the surprising break from construction that day.
Expectations, it seems, are different than hopes. For four months I’d been wishing for some quiet and order without any expectation that it would come to pass. And that was okay. My husband and I chose to embark on these projects (though we had no intention for them to happen in such close succession). We’re also very pleased with the way things are turning out. Living in a construction site has simply seemed like the price one pays for the pleasure of giving your old home a “glow up.”
Yet when my expectation of another busy day drawing us closer to completion did not come to pass, it threw me for more of a loop than the incessant pounding of hammers or shriek of saws ever did. Rather than floating away gently as my wistful hope for a day of quiet has done daily, my expectation of the way things “should be” hung around with a fierce tenacity that surprised me.
Expectations can be surprisingly tenacious
It also frustrated me – mostly because I know better. In fact, on that surprisingly quiet Monday, I was preparing to teach my philosophy students about the freedom that comes our way when we manage to let go of our expectations and welcome life as it is – even (especially) when the way life is isn’t the way we think it should be. The fact that I was so unsettled by the surprising turn my own life had taken might have made me feel like a sham had I not been able to laugh at the inanity of it all.
While I was unable to free myself from the grip of my expectation on Monday, I do think I learned something. I hope (and you and I both now know how wispy those can be) that the next time I get entangled in the aftermath of an unmet expectation that I will be better able to recognize what is happening in the moment. I hope that being better able to understand my feelings and state of mind will help me free myself to settle into life as it is.
Meanwhile, as I sit here today (two short days after the workers didn’t show up), I have been interrupted over and over. I’ve been asked to move my car. My dog is barking at what sounds like a sledgehammer coming from our mudroom. I am as twitchy as can be wondering if I’m about to have to relocate from my desk to the kitchen counter so they can replace the windows in my office. Yet, somehow, because things are as I expected them to be today, I am managing to turn my thoughts into a collection of complete sentences, something I was entirely unable to pull off in Monday’s quiet.
Go figure.
The most tangible way to practice aparigraha (often translated as non-possessiveness or letting go) is to part ways with any extra stuff that we’ve accumulated in life. This principle is much more transformative when we apply it to our expectations. When we manage to pull it off in that context, a practice of aparigraha leaves us free to fully engage with whatever life brings our way – whether it’s what we expected or not.