Something to think about:
A quote from William Young's novel "The Shack"
"The let's use your two words: responsibility and expectation. Before your words became nouns, they were first my words, nouns with movement and experience buried inside of them; the ability to respond and expectancy. My words are alive and dynamic - full of life and possibility; yours are dead, full of law and fear and judgement. That is why you won't find the word responsibility in the scriptures."
"Religion must find law to empower itself and control the people who they need in order to survive. I give you and ability to respond and your response is to be free to love and serve in every situation, and therefore each moment is different and unique and wonderful. Because I am your ability to respond, I have to be present in you. If I simply gave you a responsibility, I would not have to be with you at all. It would now be a task to perform, an obligation to be met, something to fail."
The author goes on to have "God" give the example of friendship with this theory. He talks about how if one goes into a relationship of any sort with Responsibility and Expectations that it is bound for failure for as humans expectations and responsibilities are not always met. It depends on circumstances etc... but we tend to fail when we look at things in this light. Where as if we go into a relationship with the ability to respond and an expectancy for good things, then good things will come of the relationship.
It is our ability to respond that I would like to further discuss. The ability to respond is so important in all situations and I see where as a society many of us have lost this ability to respond, we are so focussed on meeting our responsibilities or other peoples expectations of us that we forget that if we focus on good things happening and being able to respond appropriately in all situations that things will turn out much better than planned.
For myself, this seems very logical, as when I look at all things that I have failed at, be it relationships, careers, school etc... it is because I faced those things with an expectation for myself and a responsibility to someone else. The truth is, my career right now does not allow for such things, I guess it could, but for someone who is a much different person than I am. I find that daily I have responsibilities and expectations but the truth is, the expectations and responsibilities will be met if I do my best to respond appropriately in all situations. When I am working with a student and that student is having a bad day and I know that ahead of time and expect a certain negative behaviour, quite often my response is that of frustration rather than one of openness to an alternative learning method for the day. If I were to not expect anything, which is completely against all human nature, I would definitely and definitely do accomplish much more with my students. I focus on having the ability to respond appropriately in most situations and therefore when my student is grumpy with me, I can take a different approach to getting them focussed and on task, perhaps this means I need to be funny for 5 minutes, perhaps this means I need to get strict for 5 minutes, but the point is, I am able to sit and analyse the situation without bias and able to see how to best get my students attention.
Sometimes the lessons that we truly need to teach have nothing to do with Shakespeare or pythagorus' theorum, but they have to do with the social thinking of our student. I recently took a course on social thinking, it was a two day seminar with a lady who perhaps was not the best speaker, but she had a point, and a point that perhaps most of us in this profession already know, but perhaps have just not put words to it. However she made me realize the importance of how an individual thinks socially. As we are Social or in reference to my previous paragraph relational beings. Most of our life is fulfilled in relationships, be that with coworkers, spouses, children, strangers, friends, other family members or acquaintances, it is important that we know how to respond to all different types of people.
The ability to respond to all different types of people is very difficult for someone who has impaired social thinking ability. A socially limited individual might not realize that a different type of relationship is required for teachers vs. parents or spouses vs. friends of the opposite sex. It is the ability to respond that these individuals are lacking. And I find this fascinating as this lecturer that I heard the other day has success stories of kids that she has worked with to give them the ability to respond. She has worked with them to create new pathways in the brain, to allow them to perhaps read body language, or verbal cues that make them aware of how to act with a particular type of person, that for most socially adept people is very easy and very natural, but for these children is not at all natural.
I haven't talked a whole lot about the thrill of expectancy, but think about a toddler on their birthday, they have no expectation of what they want nor need, but an expectancy that something great is gonna come out of that package. Because they have no expectations whatever comes out of that package is gonna be magnificent, even if the most magnificent part of the package is the box itself. They are happy content. No wonder God tells us to have the faith of children. To have expectancy rather than expectations. With expectations nothing but heartache comes from it. As adults when we open gifts and we find something that we really don't need or perhaps something that we wanted the better version we are disappointed, but if we don't have expectations we will never be dissappointed. We will open and look at all things in a great way. I love when my students who are a little socially inept come back to school from Christmas and are just thrilled with the lower grade Mp3 player that they got for Christmas where as if a child who is socially thriving came back with an MP3 player they'd probably be happy with it, but be hiding it because it wasn't an ipod and it wasn't the "cool" thing.
I've kinda went on a tangent, but I think you get the point, and that is that our ability to respond and the thrill of expectancy is so much better than meeting responsibilities and expectations. Just thought it was a neat concept that one should think about. But truly I don't think as humans that we can ever just have the ability to respond and the thrill of expectancy because as a society we are bound to responsibilities and Expectations. There are certain things that will keep you afloat in society and if you do not meet those standards then you are generally hooped, but my challenge for all of us, is to try daily to not focus on the responsibilities and expectations laid upon us, but to look at each task with the ability to respond and an expectancy that something marvellous will come of it. Doesn't that sound so much more exciting?
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