On Sunday, I went on a hike with my husband, daughter, and niece. It was a little bit overcast, and as we ascended the mountain, we reach a low-lying cloud. The trail was relatively quiet, the forest was thick with trees and greenery and with the cloud mist all around, it looked like an enchanted forest full of magic and possibility. It's the kind of beautiful scenery that makes the Olympic peninsula good for hikes.
I was miserable.
Beautiful scenery, an afternoon spent with people I love, good physical activity that I normally enjoy and beautiful scenes out of a fairy tale and I was complaining up a storm to my husband and being an all-around crankypants.
My daughter, who is not quite three, pounded out over three miles going up a mountain like a champion. We did carry her for a bit on the way back down, but she make the top by herself. My nine-year niece never had any complaints, and even let my daughter borrow her jacket for a bit when she got cold because we forgot hers. My husband would go ahead a few feet and wait for us to catch up or take his turn holding our child's hand and walking with her at a toddler's pace. I was the only one who was not having a good time.
And it took me until today to realize exactly why that was. I was expecting it to be better. We had just bought a book of good hikes on the Olympic peninsula, and this was our first one from the book. It was supposed to be an easy trail, two and half miles to the top. Maybe it's because all all "hike" of the past year have been gentle strolls through the woods with a toddler that I had a different definition of "easy" in my head. The trail was very steep at parts, sometimes treacherously rocky, and not always well marked. We got lost once, and almost took a wrong turn another time. We learned from the GPS on a cell phone tracking our hike that the trail mileage was longer than the book had said - not by a lot, but at the time, the discrepancy felt enormous. All in all, I was expecting a better time, and I felt betrayed by both the new book and the new trail.
Today I remembered something that my senior chief told a group of us just before we graduated our training and we getting ready to go different ships. He told us the equation for happiness:
Happiness = Reality As long as happiness is >/= 1, you're good.
Expectations
And when you think about it, it's true. When you get more than you expect, yay! When life lets you down a bit, boo! The trick to getting the most out of life is to have reality better than you thought it would be. The really tricky part is to do that without lowering your expectations down to thinking that life will be miserable all the time, because another truth of life is that you see what you look for. The trick is learning how to adjust your expectations to something that can make you happy. John was looking to spend some time together as a family outside hiking for a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon, followed by ice cream. I was expecting to go up two and a half miles of relatively easy trail, back down two and a half miles, and then get ice cream at least an hour before it was time for dinner. As the trail got harder and longer and ice cream got pushed closer and closer to dinner, my reality was not meeting my expectations. As we spend time together as a family, John's happiness increased (probably would have been more if I hadn't been so cranky, but he was fairly forgiving on that front).
So sometimes, expectations need to be adjusted. Sometimes it's okay to take an extra hour on a hike. Sometimes, you don't want to because you just want to get home and get dinner started, but once you realize that you're going to take an extra hour anyway, then it's always okay to forget dinner for a while and spend time with family walking into the beginning of a magic fairy tale.
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