The Buddhists say you should let go of your expectations. That it’s Ok to have them, but not to cling to them. I got an excellent lesson in that today.
A couple of weeks ago I looked into the future and saw Valentine’s Day staring me in the face. It depends on the year how Valentine’s Day affects me (more here, here, here, here, and here), considering that I do hope to find a life partner at some point. This year, I felt positive, but also like I wanted to do something fun with people I like. So I made a Valentine’s Day bike ride.
Mostly I just wanted to get friends together to ride bikes, but I shared the Facebook event page with other friends and 12 people signed up to attend with many more “maybes.”
After I initially set up the event, a friend asked for an earlier start time. I adjusted the time from 7:30 to 5:30 in the event, but I left the original time in the description. A few people latched onto that original time. Only two people showed up at 5:30 to ride.
Too, I planned my route in part based on having a bigger pack of riders. The first part of the route was more trafficky, with the latter part of the ride being quieter. With 10 people riding together, the trafficky parts wouldn’t be so intimidating. With three riders, it became apparent the other riders weren’t comfortable continuing on the planned path.
Everyone is telling me its fine. The time mix-up. The route. I think the route ended up being even better, because after the other riders expressed their concerns, I turned off onto quieter roads. We started discussing quieter paths and shortcuts. I enjoyed the camaraderie of this, even though my initial plan was a failure.
“No worries. It’s fine.”
Yet my head is shouting, “Why did you do this thing? You’ve never done anything like it before. Why didn’t you plan more? Why didn’t you edit the event invitation better? You should have done this when you could have planned it out better.”
When I returned from the ride, a man was waiting for the 7:30 Valentine’s ride to start. I apologized for the time mix-up. He didn’t seem too upset, but he was definitely disappointed. I also apologized online. Everyone has been cool.
“No worries.”
My head doesn’t want to listen to that right now. It wants to feed the ball of stress hanging out in my solar plexus. Right now it wants to remind me how imperfect I am.
Normally I wear that badge with pride. Now it feels yucky.
And I’ll shrug it off. I’ll be Ok with me making mistakes, as I am wont to do. I accept that I had lofty expectations that weren’t completely met, and it’s Ok they weren’t. I had a different experience than I was expecting, but at the end of the day I got to go on a 10-mile bike ride in gorgeous weather with cool people.
My brain still isn’t there. I’ve had struggles at work the past couple of weeks, so this is loaded on the stress associated with that. I’ll practice yoga, meditate, and journal to get it all out of my system.
And of course, I’ll ride my bike.
In a dark time is the beginning of wisdom.
Fall down seven times get up eight. The fact that you did this at all is the getting up part. Something similar just happened to me. I kept thinking, why did I bother? It’s because if we all just sat around waiting for someone else to do it, we’d all seize up and die. Keep swinging kid.
Thanks for the encouragement! And if I decide to do something similar again, it’ll be better next time.
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