Great Expectations!

Lord Buddha said,’Desire is the root cause of evil’. 

Definitely, it is 'Desire' which is the reason for all our problems. Desire for money. Desire for fame. Desire for love. The list is endless. 

As human beings, we always had and shall continue to have desires. Even the saints who have renounced the world,they too have a desire to have control over their worldly desires. So, the deduction is that ‘desire shall always be there’. So, does it mean that since desire shall always be there, so shall be the sufferings, pain, and problems? Well, it does not necessarily mean that. As worldly people, we may never give up desire. It is just impossible. But what is possible is our attempt to minimize it. To be loved and feel wanted is the greatest weakness of most human beings. Of all the desires, the desire for love is the one that causes the greatest pain. I once heard a musical rendition. The opening lines were,’ Dil agar hai to dard bhi hoga,iska koi nahi hai hal shayad’. Very rightly said. If we have emotions, we shall have emotional attachments and emotional expectations from those who are near and dear to us. We all are born alone and die alone. But we can not live alone. We need the support of others to live. It could be our parents, siblings, children, friends, relatives. And this definitely makes our life easier. We have someone to share our feelings, our achievements, our failures, and a lot of other things. Every relationship is generally a kind of a symbiotic relationship. We give something and get back something. As long as we give happiness and get happiness in return, everything seems fine but if there is a change in this equation, the problems and sufferings start. At times relationships turn bitter. You surely have gone through this experience before. Something which was supposed to give happiness became a reason for sorrow. Whose fault was it?’Not my fault.’, we’ll say.Fine.But it is not always the other person’s fault too. You & I are right in our own context and similarly most of the time, the other person too is justified in his/her own context. Then whose fault was it? ? It was ……..Desire!, Expectations! Sometimes we go overboard with our expectations.We should be thankful to others for all that they have done for us so far.No one is bound to do everything as we expect just as we are not bound to do everything as others expect. So, what we need to do is just to hold the reigns of our expectations and not let them go wild. By transforming Great Expectations to Diminutive(small) Expectations, we can improve our lives significantly. We can be happier if we are grateful to God, Life, and People for all that they have done for us and not expecting much from them.