Featured Image Photo Credit: Kara Scherer
Expectations come from a sort of preconceived notion of what something is or will be. Expectations for me at one point equaled assumptions, hopes, and dreams. Sometimes they were there to taper me down so that perhaps I wouldn’t be disappointed, rejected. It was very polar at on both sides of the spectrum. It stems from a personal history and as you grow and experience things, expectations of the future changes as you go through life.
Before I arrived here at Lewis & Clark, expectations stemmed from my impressions I had from the tour around campus, information given by the admissions office through their website, interactions I had with alumni I knew, etc. All of this created a picture of what Lewis & Clark would be like, which was a beautiful campus, crisp air, a majestic view of Mt. St. Helens and Hood, tons of food, nice people and an amazing environmental studies program. I was stoked about all of this, and expected it to mesh with the current goals I had at the time, which were to find ways to make change through social movements, and lifestyle changes.
In my last post “There and Back Again” I talked about what inspired me to be interested in environmentalism. My expectations of the environmental studies program being able to help me find immediate solutions to environmental problems were crafted by my assumptions of the social movement being the center of absolute truth. I return to the moment in ENVS 160, where we learned about how that was not necessarily the case, where even social movements on their own fail to consider all the actors and ramifications of a certain environmental problem. I can say that in order to truly find some sort of solution or process to deal with an environmental problem, you really have to dig deep on what is happening not only on the ground, but what is occurring on all scales. This put me at an odds, and my expectations of what the program was going to do for me was totally unexpected. It was like starting from square one, where I had to really define what is environmentalism to me. What are the problems that I am truly passionate about? What am I not considering?
ENVS 160 was only the beginning of this journey of shattering my own expectations. There were experiences beyond the classroom that had me question and learn about my own expectations of not only environmental issues, but my life trajectory as well. Perhaps one of the biggest experiences that has vaulted me to a “higher understanding” of expectations, was my study abroad to Mt. Fuji. I took a huge risk to apply here, because I have never left this country before (I don’t count my cruise trip to Kiribati when I was in 2nd grade and not really conscious). I had many fears being outside my comfort zone, as I didn’t know any Japanese (which to me was ironic because I am half japanese), and I didn’t know what to expect in a culture that was different than here in the United States. This seemed to be conflicting idea that my expectations of this trip were rooted in the absence of any. However, I realize that now that one cannot truly have no expectations of anything, your brain always has some sort of projection of what something might happen. Especially on a trip of this magnitude, how could one truly have no expectations? Perhaps mine was that this trip is going to be challenging, life-changing, and mostly unknown.
I stepped on that plane alone, with only a suitcase, backpack, and a whole ton of fears. Little did I know when I arrived in Japan, that all of those fears and worries, would vanish into shear excitement and absorption. I have never been a state of absorption for as long as I was on that trip. I literally was learning every second I was there, not just about how things work in Japan historically, but also all the little social things that were happening on a day-to-day basis. I didn’t even expect how close I would be with my classmates that traveled with me, and I think it was the hyper-growth we were experiencing in a place that we all didn’t really understand. We all learned a ton about the geology and history of Mt. Fuji, we also learned a ton about ourselves and how resilient we all can be in a situation that is unfamiliar. I truly came become very close to all of these people, and that was expectation that I did not even have at the beginning.
Maybe expectations are made to be broken, and that our expectations are rooted in the person we are in the present. I used the picture of the lotus blossom to demonstrate the ephemerality of expectations, and that as you grow and experience new things and go through time, like the short life of the blossom, your expectations will fall, and you become new. The cycle seems to repeat, but most definitely comes in different forms.