I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.
Fritz Perls, “Gestalt Therapy Verbatim”
My ongoing, incessant obsession is the potential within everyone and everything, the potential to become, the potential to emerge, regardless of your stage in life. You could be eight or 88. There is still potential within us.
The neuroscientists tell us that plasticity while declining, continues until we die. That means we can adapt, we can think new thoughts, we can get off of habits and pathways that we’re used to and comfortable with. And start something new. Become something different. Let what’s within us express itself. The part of us motivated by something bigger than ourselves. A feeling, a sense, a preference that takes us into a new world.
So we can’t give up. We must continuously create space to allow those moments to happen for ourselves and for other people. And certainly for organizations. It is so easy to start to slide into the oblivion of, “There’s nothing more I can do.” “This is all there is.” “This is why I should just settle for what I have.”
I think about my mother’s paintings all the time. Her discovery of her craft, her calling, her inner self that was buried deep beneath what others expected of her.
This weekend I was talking to a group of Asian American leaders about change and potential. I retold a story that I have never written about. My mother’s first forays into the art world. She was painting these very small paintings, 2×2 inch works of art. She became enamored with these dimensions. People liked them and bought them. So she kept painting on these very small canvases.
She was early in her artistic career, perhaps five years, around 52 years old. So she started from scratch at 47! She was in a shared studio painting this little tiny painting of flowers, geraniums. She was four foot nine, a tiny person making tiny brushstrokes on a tiny canvas. Focused on her mini masterpiece, a large non Asian man towering over her, hunched down and said, “Oh, you’re the cute, cute, cute, little ,oriental woman who makes the cute, cute, cute, little tiny paintings. So cute!”
My mother was a Buddhist and also a martial artist who contained her rage and her desire to physically react to the situation and found the grace to smile and thank. She went home to her studio very angry and emotional. She simmered and contemplated what had occurred. The word “cute” cut deeply into what she wanted to be, who she was. But why was she so unsettled by this ignorant man’s innocuous comments?
My mother was incredibly self-reflective and self-aware. And said to herself, “He’s right. I’ve been painting for others. I’ve been painting to meet the expectations of others. These are not my paintings.”
My mother said often to me John, “Beware of the tyranny of expectations.” Meaning what other people want and the things that you want, that have been propelled by what other people want are all misleading and fraudulent. Out of sync with who you are and who you need to be. And that’s the tyranny of expectations. My mother had to confront the expectations of others and her ego, her expectations to paint “cute” paintings to sell them to make other people happy.
Our true expectations are often much more ambitious, more challenging than what others want us to do.
The greatest danger for most of us is not whether our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. Michelangelo
She put aside her small canvases, and her tiny paint brushes and she purchased large canvases and painting knives to use her martial arts training and to paint for herself, regardless of what other people expected. It launched an extraordinary career where she completed more than 1300 original paintings. She became focused on very large paintings, most of which most averaged 25 square feet instead of four inches. Her work was bold and unpredictable. She became the artist that was within her. Her confidence, her joy, grew out from a cute lemming to a courageous lioness.
Her most well known work, “Koi” 25 square feet.
The point of this story is that expectations of others, from others, things embedded in our minds that we don’t even remember how they got there. Those misplaced, well intended. conforming, domesticating, suppressing and oppressing expectations that disable the growth, the emergence, the rise of the true self. The authentic self. The one that is in there, the seed that needs the sunlight.
The seed never sees the flower.
Have I added to your expectations? Set unreasonable expectations? Don’t take this story literally, like all of us have this closeted artist within us that needs to be freed. Don’t misinterpret what I’m saying. My mother had this extraordinary need to express herself that I wish I inherited in some ways. But we all have our unique potential for expression that is thankfully different.
Are we expressing it?
We have to navigate the matrix, the tyranny of expectations. Because there’s so much. We’re bombarded with expectations every minute and every second. Our mind is a ceaseless little engine of expectations.
So how do we discern what is our special personal expectations from the expectations of the world around us?
Mindfulness, meditation, and solitude will give you a way of sorting through the firehose of expectations. What WE want, what is right, will become increasingly evident as we allow the expectations that are hurled at us to fall lifelessly to the ground. Protecting who you are, what you are building and being, from the tyranny.
My mother could see the mirror in the warp shield. The reflection in the rejection. The chance in the change. Can we?
She was such a role model to me. I draw great strength from her example every day and in every moment. And I am unabashed about sharing the lessons of my mother to keep the flame alive.
But I wonder, how much of who I am are the expectations of my mother………..