Societal Expectations

"Our limitations and success will be based most often, on your own expectations for ourselves. What the mind dwells upon, the body acts upon." Denis Waitley






CTV late-night news reported week that an elderly woman had been involved in a accident while boarding a streetcar. She was 75! When I told this story to my physiotherapist (He’s in his early to mid-twenties), the conversation went something like this:

‘It made me so angry, that if I had had a rotten tomato, I would have thrown it at the screen!’

‘Wasn’t she elderly?

‘No, she wasn't! But my friend who just turned 94 might be. Ask me in 20 years!’ 

Despite the fact that we hear from health-care professional that people are living longer, healthier lives, obviously whoever wrote the script for this newscast hadn’t internalized it.

Recently someone said to me, ‘Nobody ever told me what to expect as I grew older.’ And I think that is true for many of us. Because we lack the knowledge of what happened to our parents and grandparents as they aged, and what is happening to our senior friends, we don’t know what to expect. And thus we fall into the trap that growing older we live into what we perceive to be societies expectations. We expect to have difficulty climbing stairs. We expect to have sleepless nights. We expect to become hard of hearing. And because we expect these things [and many others to happen] we don’t access the medical professions when they do. The aforementioned physiotherapist is now working on improving my ability to climb stairs, which would have been much easier to deal with even three years ago… had I not seen it as an inevitable result of aging.

So I have been thinking about societal exceptions this week, and how insidious they are. The expectations about aging stopped me from even realizing that I didn’t need tp experience difficulty climbing stairs. As Stevie Wonder said, ‘You can't base your life on other people's expectations.’ But that is just what I was doing.

Someone once said to me “Everybody in church believes the same things.” Yes, that is another societal expectation! And just like many others, it isn’t true! But how many of us get caught up in it, I wonder? Have you ever talked to someone else on a Sunday morning about what brought them to church that day? And more importantly what will keep them there? I doubt very much that you will find anyone saying they came because everyone in the pews believes the same things. Yet this is one of the most touted reasons for people leaving the church and religion; [for becoming one to those we talked about a couple of weeks ago who see themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’] - a societal expectation!