Offering: December 15, 2024
Thinking through expectations
Hitting the like button is a great and free way to support these Offerings. <3
There is no audio today as I am out of town. I plan to record last week’s and this week’s newsletters when I get home and will keep you posted! Thank you.
I’ve been thinking about how the future lives quietly in us, informing the things that we do. More than we tend to think, the present is held together by a web of expectations about the way things will or might go. And though the things we expect are not always apparent, they impact our lives and decisions. I doubt anyone sets out to take the future for granted, but to a degree it’s impossible not to. I have to assume a tree won’t fall on my truck when I park it outside, for example. As I packed up for winter in Maine, I assumed it made sense to leave summer clothing at home.
There is perhaps nowhere that an unseen, assumed future is more evident than when an expectation fails to be met. The first time I walked down the stairs at my winter place, I stumbled a bit; the last step is just a bit shorter than all of the rest. That is a tiny example. When I come to realize that a future I’ve banked on is no longer an option it’s a whole lot more troubling. As philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear writes, it may be like “peering into a fog,” inside of which “if we turn on the high beams, it only gets worse.1”
My interests have swirled tightly around grief, loss and mourning these years but I’d like to assure you I’ve been laughing a ton. I’ve been increasingly interested in clowning and comedy which have given me some useful ways to think through and understand expectations. It’s been helpful because of how easy it is to overlook how much we assume without knowing. I’ve been trying to understand this better because of the way expectations are often painfully thwarted in grief. I’m curious about how counting on certain outcomes makes the present coherent. And how that coherence is ruptured when a future dissolves.
A good clown or comic reveals expectations by refusing to meet them. Rather than jump straight into a bit after walking on stage, a clown may enter awe-struck, astonished by how many people are there, visibly affected by each person’s presence. Confronted not only by the expectation that something else would have happened but also the recognition that the expectation itself had gone wholly unnoticed, the audience may resonate with the trouble of expecting in a world that often refuses to deliver what we plan for and hope. When a clown’s been successful in striking a chord, the audience marks their resonating with laughter.
Expectations and norms are related. One of the things that seems to make comedy work is when a joke reveals a norm so pervasive we don’t otherwise see it. In an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David declines his friend’s offer to give him a tour of her new house. David thwarts his friend’s expectation, sending her into a rage. And it’s a hilarious moment because, by exposing a norm—saying yes to things we don’t really want to appease other people—David highlights a widely shared tendency. His friend’s response is similarly brilliant. There are reasons it’s often so hard to say no!
So, again, I’m interested in better understanding the degree to which we expect things without noticing because I’ve been thinking so much about loss. To grieve is in part to grapple with a series of expectations that are revealed again and again over time through encounters with absence that relentlessly thwarts them. Such times are often profoundly disorienting and painful.