Greater Expectations

Wading through starched oxfords, I scouted for a bit of clearance. I managed to wedge my shoulders between two Winklevoss doppelgangers, to yell “Macallan 12 year on the rocks please”. I planned to depend on this boozy crutch until the end of the evening. As the caramel-colored wood-smoked syrup incensed the back of my throat, I fumingly ruminated on the preceding conversation.
“So, what do you do for fun?” she asked.
Excitedly, I replied, “Recently, I have started to train my dog to run with me.”
“Oh, that’s great! Are you training for a race? What is your goal?” she pressed.
My voice quavered, as my stomach plummeted. I screeched out, “As of now, I don’t have a goal per say. I really just want us to have consistent and even tempo. It’s important that we are in sync.”
I had planned to nurse this drink, but the glass was half empty now. I recalled the moment with ire. Why would she ask such a question, as if with some expectation? It was a decent question, harmless even. Then, why was I wounded? Why did I feel so small?
With a furrowed brow and a tinge of disappointment in her voice, she said, “Oh, that’s cool. My job has already asked people to sign up for next year’s marathon.”
“Next year’s marathon? Didn’t this year’s race happen two weeks ago?” I asked.
“I know,” she said with a doleful smile. “It’s like give people a chance to recover before they move onto the next one.”
Unbeknownst to my conversation partner, she goaded my performance anxiety. Because her work environment roused it in her, she now passed it along to me. The expectation was set; once a goal is achieved, it is on to the next one, without a moment of pause. She felt it and I felt it too.
Her initial question about my hobby excited me. I wanted to tell her about: how freeing it was to just run about, instead of to trudge over to a treadmill; how I was brimming with pride in my dog for taking direction and regulating his eagerness to outrun me; how it was the first time that I ran without music; how I ran without distraction, as I paid close attention to my breath, my companion, the sights and the sounds around me; how I found myself lost in the task at hand, for the pure joy of it. But, I wasn’t able to share this with her.
I wasn’t given permission to. For, the stage was set for an entirely different act and I was an ill prepared understudy. My “what I did for fun” evolved into a “fun fact about me”. The “Fun Fact” game, the well-intentioned, gawky, and inelegant “ice breaker”, lacking the awareness of a sage and the charm of the ingénue, managing to embalm dialogue, while it teeters on the edge of euthanasia from complicit and collective mortification. We are spurred to respond in a way that is compelling. All the while, Dumbo is on stage, as an aside, and is spastically flapping its ears to alert everyone about how contrived this is.
Unintentionally, she apprised me of a goal and how others would expect a concrete aim, by proxy of her employer. My only objective was to ensure that my dog and I work together. But, an entirely different objective was revealed to me through her questions, a material and measurable goal that would signal to the gentry that I had “accomplished” something. Suddenly, my purpose was diminished. How dare I do something because I simply enjoyed it, without a five-month plan and accompanying excel sheet to track my progress? Not even a pro forma!
A throng of thoughts annexed my brain en masse.
“Should I train for a race? If so, how and when? How would I do it with the dog? Should we do a 5k or maybe a 10K? Should I look up schedules when I get home?”
Ironically, I had spent all of that week contemplating the effects of performance anxiety and the milieu that has contributed to the collective anxiety we all feel.
Now, we are anxious like never before seen with regard to quantity and degree. We see this scenario play out with friends, family members, acquaintances, and random strangers. It permeates politics, the workplace, and the home. We feel pressured to constantly have a goal in mind. What’s more, there is an expectation to know, do, and say everything correctly, in a large impactful way, in an expeditious manner. Execute. No exceptions.
It would be foolhardy to do away with timelines or goals. Who needs it, when you can frolic in lilac fields, right? The problem arises when the material goal is the narrowest prism through which everything is viewed and done. Like the kaleidoscope, however, the narrow goal disrupts and distorts the intention. The external pressures stain even the most self-assured and manipulate our desires and dampen their luminosity with spurious torches. There is no space to explore, to introspectively meander about in the task. There is no time. Only the goal is allowed to occupy space, time, and attention.
What’s worse is that the pressure is contagious. I had never considered a race. It wasn’t something that I wanted. It materialized when it was imprinted on me as a given, rather than an ask and as an expectation, rather than a suggestion. And I would bet my fur-clad running partner that had the woman I met not been pressured by her place of work, she probably wouldn’t have asked the question. We infect one another without even realizing it. We set these expectations for performance all around us because we project what we can’t stand to hold within. While hot potato is not particularly fun, as everyone gets burned eventually, this is the worst version of the game.
It’s vital, for personal health as well as the health of the collective psyche, to pause and to examine how we torture ourselves. We must consider the possibility that the end is the means. It is possible to enjoy the feeling of something for the joy of doing that thing. There is even joy in the art of doing nothing or “l’arte de non fare niente”. Perhaps, we can do something for the love of that thing and its internal impact. We can envelope ourselves in the dragon silk of our personal joy and celebrate as the shrapnel of external validation cedes at our feet. For there is no greater purpose, no greater expectation than the rapture of our own internal validation.
