Great expectations...

Charles Dickens wrote an excellent novel by this name. It's one of my favorites. His book is fiction, not real, even though there may be wisps of reality in the theme, the storyline and some of the characters. Reality tells me that for much of the human race, having great expectations means owning large bottles of Excederin, because, if your expectations are even modest that people will think and/or do the right thing, you have a lifetime of headaches coming your way.

I'm not a 100% cynic, or at least I won't admit that I am. I just know that people don't frequently turn to their gray matter, introduce themselves, get to know it, and then use it on a regular basis--say, once a week or more. Sometimes I wonder if most of us haven't been reincarnated and we were sheep in our former lives, or guppies, or newts, or amoebas, or...well, you get the picture. I'm still mostly an optimist, and I believe that people will think before speaking or acting and that they'll gather information, salient clues, turn to experienced individuals for advice, etc., before they forge ahead with whatever they are doing. But, mostly I'm still surprised by the lack of thought or effort given to any human endeavor.

Is it that we want someone just to tell us what to do or think and we don't want to get a mental hernia working through the decisions, the quandries, the dilemnas of life? Do we just want to be rote in our work, our play, our relationships? (Or worse, do we want them to resemble what we see on TV and at the movies?) We listen to political leaders (now that's a scary thought), to religious leaders (it can be a good thing if your religious leaders are solid citizens who have an understanding of humanities' needs and perils and aren't holding their hands out for donations to help them build a mega mansion or take a trip to some exotic port), to friends (hopefully, your friends will be like the lifeline types on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and they will know more than you do), to psychics (change the ending by eliminating "ics" and adding "o" and recognize that these people at the other end of the telephone are getting paid to talk to you and have been trained to keep the conversation going for as long as possible to maximize the charges so their company gets money to pay them and still make a tidy profit), to aliens or pets (cats are aliens who have been brought here on the mothership, have been banished from their outerspace homes for being so aloof and demanding, and whose ultimate goal is to make humans feel inferior--they're very good at this and may well succeed), or the voices in our own heads (not a good sign). Our minds are heading in the direction of Miss Haversham in her bedraggled, cobwebbed, tattered and yellowed wedding gown...waiting for something to happen that never will unless we make it so. When Miss Haversham, or should I call her Ms. Haversham, first found herself alone at the "party", she should have put on her red dress, her dancing shoes and headed to the closest night spot for some major toe-tapping activity. Alas, she did not.

I guess the most important lesson in all of this is that naming a book "So-So Expectations", "Not-So-Great Expectations", "Pathetic Expectations", or "Lower Your Expectations" just wouldn't have taken the literary world by storm. And Dickens' other book titles would have suffered as well--"A Tale of a Couple of Towns", "David Zincfield", "Oliver Spiral", "A Holiday Tune" (that one at least is politically correct)...