Question After Question

I’ve received lots of snaps about this year’s hugely successful gardens since I posted about it on social media this week. We had a great season, and now that it’s ending, I’ve been looking back with amazement and gratitude, and gushing about it online.

Keep sending those high-fives and good vibes: I love them. But I never let things rest. I’m always questioning what is, what was, and what’s to be. I question my motives, my methods, my expectations, and my beliefs. I question the questions I ask.

So, it’s inevitable that I would ask myself how I would be feeling right now if the gardens were not such a success. What if, after all the hard work, our vegan crops were decimated by insects or leveled by lousy weather? What if I or my husband became ill and couldn’t have tended the gardens? What if, for whatever reason, the food gardens we wait all year to cultivate just failed, and the summer of our gardening dreams was a wash-out?

As a Buddhist, I ask myself this question - even as I bask in the success of our gardens – because I know that impermanence, change, and unpredictability are the nature of everything, and all Buddhists endeavor to prepare themselves, every minute of every day, for the insubstantiality of it all. Nothing is a given.

That gets me thinking about expectations. We humans get ourselves into some tight spots with our expectations. We create very specific stories in our minds about how our lives should be. Whether it be expectations about ourselves, our relationships, our marriages, our children, our jobs, our faith, our finances, our gardens, or about what life in general is supposed to be serving up for us, we all write scripts for ourselves.

Instead of allowing life to give us what’s intended, instead of trusting serendipity and where spirit wants to take us, what serves a higher purpose, and where we need to be in order to be of service, we force ourselves and those around us into acting in the scripts we’ve written. And as years pass, and we find that our spouses, co-workers, family, friends, and even strangers are not going to occupy the places we’ve assigned to them, what we usually do instead of questioning our beliefs is just dig a deeper cement hole of expectations. It gets gnarly after a while.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Socrates. He said that the unexamined life is a life not worth living. I love this. It spotlights the importance of questioning in our lives.

Asking questions is the path to growth and freedom, and for Buddhists, the way to enlightenment. It can be scary to ask questions. It can be even scarier to question our expectations. We become very attached to our expectations.

If I should expect my husband to be a certain way - to want the things I want, feel the way I feel, to have the appetites I have and in the same measure, to believe the things I believe – you may be sure that these expectations are going to work against our marriage. My husband will never be able to re-invent himself to fit the very narrow confines of my expectations for a spouse. Nor should he try. In turn, his expectations for me would only serve to work against our marriage covenant – which is to accept the other as is, love unconditionally, give daily, ask but never demand, forgive, and look after each other without expecting anything in return.

I hope I’m not crazy or dumb enough to believe that we can shed all our expectations, and then go on with our lives. That’s an ideal that all Buddhists strive for, but not all achieve. But what we should be doing is asking lots of questions about our expectations.

The role of questioning is as Socrates said – to examine our lives closely in order to become clearer about our beliefs, our choices, our creeds, and our expectations. We should question our expectations and how we’re using them to influence and control ourselves and others.

I have a friend who has decided she wants to have a baby. Her husband has two children from a previous marriage, and doesn’t want more. My friend has threatened to divorce her husband if he doesn’t give her a baby. She is using expectations to control her husband, to override his will, to force him to do something he doesn’t want to do. That’s extremely destructive. 

She’s already ruining her marriage over this, and you may be sure that their relationship, whether or not he complies and has a baby with her, is going to end bitterly someday. And you bet that if she doesn’t realize that it was her expectations that capsized her marriage, she’ll spend the rest of her life blaming her ex-husband for their divorce and the pain it caused. That’s tragic.

That’s what I mean about questioning our expectations and how we’re using them. We must all become very clear about the scripts we’ve written for our lives and whether they’re really serving us and those around us. My friend believes that having a baby is going to complete her somehow. But what she’s ignoring in the controlling abuse of her husband is the fact that she may get the baby she thinks she wants, but she’s going to lose her marriage. 

She’s not questioning herself and her beliefs: she’s not taking an honest look at her expectations. She’s letting her expectations about children hijack their marriage. She feels angry, but she’s not recognizing her anger as what all anger really is – a symptom of fear. In her case, I think her fear is not of never having a child, but of never having her expectations realized.

There is no such thing as an inelegant question, or a wrong one. Hammer yourself with questions, and examine your expectations. I’m advocating that we all question everything – our codes, creeds, expectations, hopes, beliefs, and choices – every single day.

If, for example, you’re Catholic and your faith requires that you never question your faith – which is an interesting safety net if I’ve ever heard one – then start questioning it. Stop being a slave to your expectations, beliefs, creeds, and choices. Question everything, every day. We have no right to burden others with our expectations – like my friend and her expectations for motherhood - and when we do, we blaze a path of destruction. Just as importantly, we should also relieve ourselves of the demands of those expectations, and breathe free.

Some gardens are good, some not so good. We had a great summer, but it could have gone differently. Each spring, I must embrace impermanence and release my expectations about the gardens, work hard to do well, but accept whatever Mother Nature hands us. Our gardens, whether they’re abundant or not, are hotbeds of love and acceptance, hard work, and an understanding of the nature of impermanence. And that’s good enough for me.

Much love,

Barbie xo