“How’s Bushy doing today?”This is the question posed by my Travel Companion everyday, since my birthday (refer birthday post "How old are you?"), which was 8 days ago. You must be wondering who this Bushy is. Bushy, apparently, is the pot of flower surprise gift from my Travel Companion.
“I am not crazy about flowers.” I told my Travel Companion about this when we first started dating. “But I do expect flowers from you for once on some very special occasion.”
After months of the conversation, there was still no sign of flowers. Maybe he was waiting for a special occasion? No, no flowers for both anniversaries (refer earlier post). Well, maybe it’s just not time? Maybe he wanted to throw me a surprise all of a sudden. Whatever reason it was, I decided not to let the disappointment grow. It’s just flowers. Plus I’m not really into flowers. It’s just a girl thing.
When the flower was delivered to my apartment, I was not as thrilled as I thought I would be. The romantic feeling was totally not there. Part of it was my Travel Companion dropped me the hint few days before. Another reason was I was expecting a colorful attractive bouquet of flowers and better still delivered directly from my Travel Companion. It turned out to be very far from how I wanted it to be. Was I disappointed? A wee bit; the whole flower thing just did not come out the way I imagined. On top of that, it did not completely come out as a surprise surprise since I had been teasing him for not getting me one earlier on. And now I finally got it. The whole feeling was just, "Oh he got me flowers for my birthday."
But soon enough, I realized I should not feel this way. The root of disappointment is expectation; when our expectation is not met, we feel disappointed. If the disappointment expands, the more frustrated and unhappy we would become and might even end up being unhappy about the other person or party.
Sure, it is absolutely all right to have some expectations of someone. It is just like our parents expect us to do well and have a happy and successful life. So does expecting a birthday gift from my boyfriend. These expectations do sound reasonable. But do you think all our expectations are truly reasonable? Say our parents expect us to do well and be happy and successful in whatever we are pursuing. Maybe to them, being a lawyer or engineer or earning 100K per year is successful, whilst to us we are happy with a job we are interested in albeit the pay is low. Are we not fulfilling our parents' expectations? Not really. As long as we are happy with what we are doing, we have already succeed in meeting their expectation. he same goes to my expectation(s) of my Travel Companion. He could have forgotten about my birthday. He could have just sent me a birthday card or just wish me "Happy Birthday". And he could also just keep ignoring the disappointed expression of my face whenever I was teasing him about not getting me flowers. But he did not. Not only he was aware of my expectations. He made an effort to search an online florist and got me something I presumed he thought was very nice. In fact he did. Apparently what I received was completely different from the picture he saw online.
So later that night when he saw the actual flowers that I received, he was not quite happy about the florist. He described the flowers as weed. But we were cool about it. In the end, we decided to name it as Bushy and kept joking about it everyday.
Strangely enough I started liking Bushy. I was searching some tips in drying the flowers since they don't last today. Not that I love flowers all of a sudden. But because I really appreciate what my Travel Companion did for me. It is no longer important anymore about all those (unreasonable) expectations of how I wanted the flowers to be, how he should had surprised me earlier without my direct and obvious hint. Because in the end, he did whatever he could to make me happy. Why was I so fussed over getting flowers from him? Seriously it is not about flowers. Well, it is difficult to explain. Yeah, now haven't you already realized how unreasonable our expectations could be sometimes?
♥ every page of my imagination
