A rainy night, a soaked bedsheet, and an unanswered questionnaire—small reminders that expectations rarely unfold the way we imagine.
It must have rained sometime during the night. When I stepped onto the balcony to take a photo, the deck was wet.
The bedsheet my wife had hung out to dry overnight was soaked through, and later I heard her cry of dismay when she discovered it.
To make matters worse, the forecast says it will be cloudy all day, so recovering any dryness during daylight hours seems unlikely.
Since this happened at home, it’s hardly someone else’s problem. It’s troubling—very much our own doing.
When my wife asked last night whether she should hang the sheets, I casually said, “It should be fine,” without even checking the weather forecast. So half the responsibility is mine.
In that sense, I’m just as disappointed as she is.
“To have one’s expectations disappointed” means that a prediction or hope is betrayed and things don’t go as planned.
Implicit in this is the presence of an “other”—a person, nature, or circumstance that does not move according to our wishes.
It is essentially the same as “being let down.”
Whether the object of our expectation is another person or the weather, when reality fails to match what we hoped for, we lament that our expectations have been undone.
My wife took care of the household chore of hanging the sheets at night.
Her modest hope—that it wouldn’t rain until morning—was simply overturned by the rain that came after midnight.
No one did anything wrong.
It’s not as though God decided to tease her by sending rain in the night.
I’ve been circulating a questionnaire to members of a subcommittee for a certain academic society, but the responses have been slow to return.
This, too, is another case of disappointed expectations.
It never helps to expect too much from others.
In life, expectations are bound to be broken.
Perhaps it’s better to live with that understanding—so that the shock, when disappointment comes, will be gentler.
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