Unrealistic Expectations or Just Positive Thinking?

It has been brought to my attention that perhaps my expectations in life are a bit unrealistic. I’m not sure this is true.  I see nothing wrong with continuing to set high goals for myself regardless of…well… anything.

Yes, it’s true, the aging process can slow us down a bit and I agree that no one has the endurance we had when we were twelve. I mean, have you tried to jump rope recently? If memory serves me correctly, my childhood friends and I would jump rope until the endless counting bored us to death, at which point we’d move on to hula hoop. That would last until our mothers called us in for lunch and still no one had let the hoop hit the floor.

I took up the jump rope last winter. One hundred skips is like running half a marathon. And then I found some old hula hoops while cleaning out the shed and discovered it’s nothing like riding a bike; just because you learned how once upon a time, doesn’t mean you’ll never forget. Yet I’m going to work on it. Somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain is the correct placement of the hoop and the rhythm that kept it endlessly swirling around and around. It would probably work wonders on my waist line. And as I recall, I was a skinny little thing back then.

Speaking of memories: “You can’t expect to remember everything,” I’m reminded. “We all forget stuff these days.”  I won’t argue with that, we certainly do. Yet I would expect to remember why I’m pulling into Costco or just exactly what I’m doing standing in the laundry room looking around for who knows what. And I absolutely hate it when I’m making an introduction and can’t remember my husband’s name. Not everyone wants to call him “honey”.

It’s possible my expectations are a little high. I could learn to relax and try to go with the flow. Yet I’m afraid If I do, a year from now I’ll find myself fat, stupid, and lost (literally). Then everyone will say, “She should have stuck with her unrealistic expectations. Maybe they weren’t so unrealistic after all; maybe they were just positive thinking.”

Later,

Mary Ann