Having expectations is common. The fact that expectations are not met is also common. When your expectations are not met, what you need is to have a broader perspective.
Having no expectations in life is difficult, because as long as we are in a samsaric existence, it is impossible not to have them; what is important is not how many expectations you have, but to what extent they influence you. Some people are totally victims of their own minds due to these expectations and cannot find a way out of this situation because the mind, which could offer the way out, is here the cause of the problem. When your expectations are not met, what you need to have is a broader perspective. For example, if you work in a company and are given a good position and told: “We are giving you this position only for six months,” you will be very happy working in your new position for those six months. If at the beginning of the seventh month, they tell you that you can work in that position for a few more months, you will work happily during those months because you do not know until when you will be there; you are aware that perhaps next month you will no longer have the job, but you know you survive, and every time the end of the month approaches, you are open to whatever happens because that situation has placed you in an open position. Conversely, if you have a permanent job and after two years you are notified that you might be replaced by someone else, your experience is totally different: you feel insecure, uncomfortable, distressed, and you feel you have all the problems in the world. The situation is similar, but the perspective is different.
So, how do we relate to life? We have to relate to it in an open way. This does not mean that we do not make efforts to do things better, but we have to be open to both the good and the bad, and this will make our lives easier. We have to be attentive, because generally we tend to focus more on the reasons for being unhappy and less on the reasons for being happy; this seems to be the human condition. When we realize this, we can transform everything: what changed was our perspective on life.
Sometimes I feel very sad seeing that there are people who have great suffering. What is happening to them? They only see one problem, that problem they cannot overcome; they are stuck in a situation they see very clearly and do not realize all the other things they have in their lives. Because of that, they cannot see the beauty, they can only see one thing: the problem; they are attached to the problem.
Having expectations is normal. The fact that expectations are not met is also normal, because things do not always happen as one expects. When our expectations are not met, this makes us feel bad, makes us begin to experience human suffering.
Buddhism is a tool for working with these things. In the West, for example, every time an expectation is not met, it is experienced as an individual, personal failure. If a person tried to do something in their life and it was not achieved, they automatically think something is wrong with them. This is a very prevalent idea; the person does not stop to think if that project was very difficult to achieve, or what was happening, what the situation was. Sometimes we are not aware that we see this as a personal failure, but internally we are feeling it; we do not see that perhaps the failure had to do with the other person, with the business, or with the job, but we feel that we did something wrong. What would be the difference if our expectations had been met? There would be no such difference, because that too would be an illusion.
We always place more emphasis or interest on what we do not have, on what is difficult to obtain, and we are not interested in what we obtain easily nor do we place emphasis on it. That is why it is said that we must learn to love what we have. But we do not do it, and we always want what we do not have. Then we truly have a problem: if we don’t have it, it’s a problem; if we have little, it’s a problem; if we have too much, it’s a problem. In Tibet, it is said that if one has a yak, one has the problem of having a yak; if one has two yaks, one has the problem of having two yaks; and if one has no yaks, one has the problem of not having yaks.
So, perspective is more important than content—that is my personal experience— and it is necessary to know how to process the emotions we experience when our expectations are not met. It is necessary to know what to do.
The way to process these situations is to depersonalize personal problems, that is, not to make personal problems personal. And when we do this, the problems are resolved. Generally, we take even those problems that are not personal as our own. If we were to say: “I did my best to achieve this business, but probably there was no karma, because it didn’t happen,” that would be the way to depersonalize the problem, because it means we understand that things sometimes happen and sometimes do not happen, and that it is not a personal failure, it is not that we did something wrong. This is a much better way to work with that situation. And it would be even better if we could depersonalize personal problems in Dharmakaya, because there is no personality there anymore; it simply dissolves.