Crushed by expectations?

Years ago I had the privilege of being part of a professional group where members could bring cases and incidents from their work. We talked in a secure setting, and we shared our common professional perspective so that we could grow in our ability to do our jobs.

The respect we felt for one another allowed us largely—not completely, but largely—to put aside our competitive streaks and really listen. We could practice both sympathy and empathy, and at the same time question or challenge.

One member of this group was a puzzle. He had a reputation for running a great institution. We thought him brightest of the lot. He was hard-working. He was successful. He was openly envied by his peers. But he always seemed to be restless. He was hard on others and even harder on himself. Nothing was ever quite right or good enough.

One day he came to the group looking like a changed person. A symptom of that change was that he said nothing for the whole session, uncharacteristic to say the least.

When we had finished the day’s case, the convener asked, “Anything else for today?” Our quiet friend said simply, “I learned the most astonishing thing the other day. Before I was born, my mother had given birth to a first son. He was the first child to be born to both my sets of great-grandparents, and the first son in the family for generations. He was said to have been an unusually beautiful baby and he, therefore, carried huge hopes of his proud parents and grandparents. And then, at six months old, he died. And with him, his name and his memory. No one ever spoke of him again.”

There was more. From a relative, he learned that when he was born, he was given the name of the dead child. “My parents loved me and they gave me the best,” he continued in a quiet, now changed way. “They challenged me in the right way, of course. But nothing was ever quite good enough. Not the nearly all A’s in school, not the track ribbons, not the high SAT scores.”

After another pause, “What I’ve learned is that I’ve been living for two. I have had to carry the hopes and the dreams and the expectations of two sons. No wonder I, and my achievements, were never quite enough. I didn’t even know about that brother, let alone know him. But, I was held to a standard of his potential life as well as my own actual life. “

There was a profound silence as we tried to take in what he was trying to take in. Over the next months, we saw that it was not easy for him to change a lifetime of habits and expectations. It never is.

So, how about you? What expectations do you live by — or under?

Most of us make promises. We start relationships. We work with and for other people. We otherwise live in an inescapable net of expectations. Those expectations have to be faced and sorted out. The real ones from the imagined ones. The ones you’ve knowingly embraced versus the ones that are so deeply unconscious you don’t even know what they are.

Like a dead brother, or an unspoken hope, you never knew of.

I don’t know if this wisdom applies to the shared life of our culture or our nation at this tough time. But it just may be that we are being crushed by impossible expectations, wishing for a time of harmony that never actually existed.

That suggests we need todo our own work first. It won’t be easy.

Then, we can work on our deep divisions, find a place where we can recover some shared truths, and even relax a bit.

One thing is for sure: it won’t ever be 1980 or 1960, or, God help us, 1860 again.

But freed from unreal expectations we may just find our way.

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Shana Tovah to all my Jewish friends for 5786. And to everyone, of whatever faith or none, I recommend the Monday evening Erev Rosh Hashanah sermon of Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of New York’s Central Synagogue. She is gifted, graceful and fearless. Would that national leaders had the balance and incisiveness to speak the way she does. Find the sermon here, beginning at 1:17:35.