No expectations

One of the best things about starting over in a new place is the freedom from having a lot of preconceived notions about things. Right now, for instance, daytime temperatures have been hovering in the mid to upper 30s in the central Willamette Valley. And every night when I watch the news from Portland there is much grousing and commiseration among the anchors and commentators that it is supposed to be about 54 degrees at this time of year, and why in the hell is it not warming up, already? The poor weather guy really has to take a lot of flak about it. People are quite offended the weather is so "abnormal" right now.

But for us, with this being our first year here, we have no expectations. Which I'm glad about, considering I made something of a cottage industry of complaining about summers in California when we lived there. So if we wake up and it's 27 degrees that seems just fine, thank you very much. It's still February, and we knew February means chilly temps anyplace north of the 40th parallel. So we're open to whatever form winter is going to take, including ice and snow. We're never disappointed because we have no expectations...or years past to compare anything to. What freedom there is in that!

54 degrees?

No expectations.

Expectations are really a curse in long-term commitments, when you think about it. We expect friends, the weather, spouses, towns and restaurants to all be a certain way, and it really fries us if they start to change and we don't like the direction things are moving. And the longer we've been enjoying something, the more we take offense when the ground beneath our feet starts to shift. That's why, occasionally, our elders can seem like such massive pains in our behinds. Often you'll find that, for them, the way things were has hardened in stone and is now the way things should always be. With pretty sharply defined edges. There is sometimes anger in nostalgia; paradise lost and all that. What a way to curse a perfectly good present.

I'm not afraid to say that I'm not exactly sure how it's all going to work as we move to our new place, and in fact am kind of excited by that fact. Homesteading is, by its nature, fairly monotonous, and so re-learning it all in a new place is certainly one way to keep it fresh, if one can just resist the temptation to try and bring the past routines along and cram them into new spaces. That probably would not work anyway, and I've seen people broken by the act of trying to make that happen. 

It's hard to keep those expectations at bay, but trying to stay in the zen of the present is a good exercise for staying open to any new ideas up ahead.