Free-falling with a smile

Expectations.

That was I guess what the night-long conversation gradually centrifuged around. Last Saturday, Poh Mui and I began our conversation at the bookstore, which ended only when she got off the taxi we shared. From chatting about a stifling social structure, to Indian travels, to workplace jokes, it also started to fall around the topic of expectations. You know a conversation is revolving around a theme when we started to crack mundane 'expectations' jokes.

Let us set the context. There is a hope of a near future that I started out hoping for. After some time, I started to consciously shut out that voice of optimism in my head; that happened when I started getting reminded of the potential agony of free-falling when you hope so high in the clouds. So I stopped hoping, or so I claimed. The expectations that come with hoping sometimes sets me up for an excrutiating smack when that hope fails to materialise. So the simple logic follows: hopes comes with expectations, expectations sets me up for pain, hence stop hoping to avoid pain.

Poh Mui disagreed. She advocates holding on to hopes but without expectations. Hopes without expectations. Is she even human? I admitted to her that I really couldn't fully comprehend such an idea. In my mind, expectations was so intrinsic to having hopes that they were never possibly mutually exclusive. Sure, I understood the theory she espounded, of having hopes but blot out the expectations that may come with it. In practice, having tried for nearly 11 years, I can't seem to do that. At best, telling yourself not to have expectations merely softens the thud of betrayal and hurt I feel when reality fails to reach my hopes.

Poh Mui kept repeating that I should hope without expectations. Perhaps if it was with anyone else on any other night I might not have been as patient. She said that repeating would get the idea into my thick head. And in a way, perhaps it did. Poh Mui's relentless insistence on the idea did penetrate my cynic-shield.

Perhaps its all about having the guts to do it. Right now, I'm standing at the edge of the airplane, parachute on, and refusing to take that final and crucial step off the plane because I was caught in the web of logic. I was trying to make sense of something that didn't. In things such as this, it really takes that leap of faith, not pedantic careful steps of logic.

The conversation that night might be that necessary push in the back to start the free-fall. I've stepped off that edge so many times before in my life, yet somehow I am reluctant this time. Perhaps this is what age does to you. I guess everyone needs that little reminder.

I guess everyone has their different philosophies of life. Some would never even put themselves in that precarious position on standing at the edge of a free-fall. But that is me; at so many times in life I've been there, and so often lept. And each time, whether I landed safely or fell with a thud, the ride was always worth it; it often made me a better boy.

Perhaps in the end, its about the courage I have to be myself, to close my eyes and step off the edge, smiling.