cliffs & what ifs
If you ever get the chance to, go to Ireland. Go to Dublin and wander along the cobblestone and admire all the colorful buildings and the lively music wafting out of most of them. Visit some old castles and old libraries. Take a big charter bus out to Galway and explore little seaside towns. Drink Irish coffee and dance in a pub. Drive through the countryside and listen to an Irish tour guide tell you a few too many Irish puns. Most of all, get out to the Cliffs of Moher and probably bring an inhaler because they will take your breath away.
I saw pictures of these cliffs once while I was doing research in high school on Ireland. I was playing an Irish girl, who had been aboard the Titanic, in Titanic the Musical, and I was doing research on the land she came from (she did actually exist, she was not just a character, thank you very much). I remember seeing them, thinking they were much too beautiful to be real, and tucking them away in my memory somewhere. Years later, my now-boyfriend, then just boy-friend, took a little trip to Ireland and posted a picture with his legs swinging over the side of the cliffs, and I remembered that little tucked-away memory. They were still just as pretty.
But then you actually go, and you see them in real life. And you’re there, looking out over the impossibly blue ocean standing impossibly close to the edge, wondering how a bunch of rock could ever look this good and how any of the hills around you could be this green. And this is one of those things that lives up to and exceeds expectation. It really is. Pictures will never do this place justice - no matter how many we took.
But honestly, I was prepared for them not to be as good as I thought they’d be. Sometimes I think when we want something for a while, we get attached to an image that might be a little photoshopped, disappointed if it’s less than. To be honest, there aren’t many things that actually do live up to the expectations we hold, as I have been learning through some firsthand experience lately. So that weekend, and in the weeks since, I’ve been thinking about just that - expectations.
Expectations are a strange thing. Funny enough, today I heard a sermon at church where the pastor said that we need to have expectations. That when we stop holding them, we stop really striving to work for things or look forward to anything. He said that we should always expect God to move in grand ways. But even that is tricky. Sometimes God’s movements don’t look at all like what I think they should look like, but just because it’s not the movement I may have prayed for, doesn’t mean I stop expecting God to show up.
It’s similar with others in relationship - a few things I’ve noted as of late -
Expectations have to be fair. And realistic.
They also have to be communicated. People are not mind-readers. We can’t expect people to know what we expect. Get it?
Grace is there to clean up when we fall short.
Standards and expectations are different - I think maybe standards are more general and expectations are more specific, both important, but in different ways.
And so. What do cliffs have to do with all this? Being there, the photos becoming reality, made me realize something that I think is a big win. In this case, they exceeded my expectations. But had they not, would I have been upset? Probably. And I honestly probably wouldn’t have been able to enjoy them.
We can’t let expectations rob us of experience.
In a lot of cases, things will turn out differently than we expect. Sometimes that means things need to change in a relationship, or that we need to communicate better. Other times, it means that the expectation was so big that it blocked our view of the experience in front of us. There is some land I think I’ve been trying to find between holding things loosely and standing firm. And I’m still just dancing around trying to find it. It seems like it’d be a good place to live.
