Unrealistic Expectations

The younger you are the more unrealistic your expectations are likely going to be. When you are really little you might think that your Dad and Mom are perfect and can never make a mistake. A lot of little kids are like this. But as life disappoints you more and more as you grow up, hopefully you find some way to deal with all this and to still stay alive and functional.

I was thinking today just how completely unrealistic it is for anyone to think that a "Rapture" could happen that would include everyone on earth. I can see individual "Raptures" happening for individuals at different points in their lives but not one that includes everyone. I just don't find that realistic in any way, shape or form. Spiritual stuff is very individualistic in the end. Just like you don't find 1 billion people becoming Saints all at the same time. Saints become saints one at a time all the time. It is never 1 million people becoming sainted at once.

The time I noticed how awful unrealistic expectations were the most is from ages 18 to 25 years of age. But it seems like really hitting the wall in ones life like I did between ages 18 and 25 allowed me to be pretty happy from 32 to 40 and from 50 until now at 63. My life could have really been awful without those times of unrealistic expectations and wanting to die with everything in my being rather than dealing with one more moment of the hell here on earth. It wasn't that I didn't have a lot of girlfriends and it wasn't that I wasn't handsome and it wasn't that I didn't have enough food or clothes or cars or bicycles or motorcycles or even friends. It was that my life went in a completely unexpected direction that I could not recover into any life that I would have ever chosen to live through ever. It was like squeezing a square peg through a round hole or vice versa. what happened to me in my 20s I was completely unprepared for.

So, I guess what I'm saying is sort of "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans". Most of the time your plans just aren't going to work out at all or the way you think they will. Most of the time the best you can do is to look for opportunities to survive any way you can. Most of the time your dreams might even get in the way of your basic survival mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Most of the time from zero to about 30 you just have no real idea what life is actually about at all. You just don't know it yet. You think you know everything. But you don't. Finding that out as you age is really horrific but necessary to keep on surviving. Then just when you figure everything out by about age 35 life throws you a curve ball and then you have to start adapting to aging starting by about 37. I remember when I first learned about this. I was doing a class 4 (relatively easy rock climbing move) on a rock over about 4 feet of water in the ocean and I pulled the muscles off the back of my knee and fell into the ocean and almost drowned in the waves. My teenagers and wife who were down the beach laughing and playing didn't realize I had almost died because I couldn't stand up because I couldn't stand up alone and likely couldn't walk. What was the problem? I was 37 doing a move that wouldn't have been a problem if I had been under 30. But at 37 things just don't always work as well as you might expect sometimes. So, you can't always count on everything working perfectly anymore like it once did. (I still have a slightly different gait at times because I didn't have the 40,000 to 60,000 dollars to reattach the muscles back into the back of my knee then. Instead I held my leg and prayed for it to heal. A physical therapist told me I should be a cripple with an injury like that but I'm not and that it is too late now that I can afford it to fix it now. By holding my calf and visualizing my leg healing my muscles reattached themselves to my right calf muscle instead of the back of my knee so that I why I can still walk normally now. Then by stretching I trained these reattached muscles to work somewhat the way my old leg muscles worked when they were attached to the back of my knee.

The point of all this is that we all have unrealistic expectations at every point in our lives. The point of all this is to find a way to survive these unrealistic expectations whether it is a group rapture, someone we want to get with or marry, some place we want to go, a job we want to get or whatever it is. We all just have to find a way to cope anyway whether we get what we want or not.

Finding a way to go on no matter what just like the pioneers of America always did. For them, if they survived it was a good day, because when they looked around everyone who hadn't survived was dead. So, if you can find a way to survive and some good friends to hang out with then you just about have it all. So, find a good way to cope with your life. Any day you survive is a good day!

note: in regard to a class 4 climb:

YDS Class

The system consists of five classes indicating the technical difficulty of the hardest section:

• Class 1 is walking on an even, often planar, surface with a low chance of injury, and a fall is unlikely to be fatal.
• Classes 2 and 3 are steeper scrambling with increased exposure and a greater chance of severe injury, but falls are not always fatal.
• Class 4 can involve short steep sections where the use of a rope is recommended, and un-roped falls could be fatal.
• Class 5 is considered true rock climbing, predominantly on vertical or near vertical rock, and requires skill and a rope to proceed safely. Un-roped falls would result in severe injury or death.
• The above is quoted from: Wikipedia under the heading:
  

  Grade (climbing) and then YDS Class.