Lowered expectations

I was in the shower yesterday and I started thinking. That isn’t to say that I’m prone to deep thinking in the shower. I’m just as apt to be singing Louie, Louie or some Hannah Montana song (if that’s what my kids were listening to on the radio) as I am to think something out. Heck, to be honest, I’m probably more apt to be singing something. So, on this rare occasion, I was thinking.

J-mom had just cut my hair. She did a pretty good job. I mean, anyone that can make this head look decent is doing good things. It was first time cutting an adult’s hair and only her second-ever hair cut. But, in the shower, I started thinking about how, after years of going to barbers, I have an innate sense of what should happen when I get a haircut. Even knowing that my wife had only ever cut my son’s hair prior to mine, there was an expectation there. Because it was there, I found it harder to just be happy that I was getting a free haircut than if I’d just accepted the fact that even if she screwed up badly, I could just shave my head – which was my last haircut.

UPDATE: It was pointed out to me that I might not have been very clear. I am quite happy with the haircut. What is weird is that when an experienced barber cuts your hair, you expect the clippers to move a certain way across your head. It was just a different experience. Not in any way a bad one.

ALSO, I should point out that over the past couple of years I have paid for some pretty lousy haircuts.


Seriously. There's only so much
you can do with this head.


So, I jumped to a conclusion. Self, I hypothesized to myself, it might be a better world if we lived without expectation. Just think how better entertainment would be if we had no preconceived notions about what we were getting into. Think how wonderful and surprising our experiences would be if we didn’t have any expectations guiding our attitudes. Think about how thankful we’d be if we didn’t expect certain things from people.

Yeah, that sounded good for about second. Then I quickly thought about how bad it would be if we didn’t hold certain people to a level of expectations. How bad would car repairs be? How bad would our educational system be (how much worse can it get, I guess)?

So, maybe it wasn’t the most enlightening rabbit trail, but it’s what I was thinking about. Perhaps I’ll just stick to singing for a while.