Podcast Episode 114 - Happy Thanksgiving - is there a gap between your holiday expectations and reality?
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Happy Thanksgiving, my friend!
Today is Thanksgiving. I love Thanksgiving; I really do. It’s like the unsung hero of, you know, the big three holidays, Halloween, you got Thanksgiving, you got Christmas, and Thanksgiving kind of gets passed over.
It’s one of my favorites because it’s the one time my entire family is together a year.
I get this picture of how it will be in my head. And it’s, it’s grandiose, it’s everything’s going to go right. We’ll be sitting there having fun together, you know, maybe we’re going to play a game. We’re all interacting, having deep, meaningful conversations, sitting around the dinner table, enjoying each other’s company and having fun.
And inevitably, it never works out exactly like that. Ever.
Disappointment comes when there is a gap between what we idealize, what we dream about, what we think it will look like, and reality.
And the more significant the gap, the bigger the disappointment.
And I’ve had some big disappointments over the years.
And I had to realize that life doesn’t always work exactly how I dream in my head, how I think it should be, or how I want it to be; it doesn’t always work out that way. Because you know what, there are other people involved. And they have their idea of how everything should go. And so you’ve got all these people with how they got it in their head, how it should go.
The more I have learned to roll with the punches over the years, the more I can sit there, relax, and enjoy what happens. I can enjoy just being in the moment. And not putting these unrealistic expectations on people, not only unrealistic expectations but also expectations they don’t even know I’m putting on them.
So be present with the people that you’re with if you’re with people this Thanksgiving. And if you’re not, if you’re alone, find something you love to do that you don’t even usually get to do.
Enjoy what is instead of what you think should be.
Roll with the punches, release what Thanksgiving should look like, release what a holiday should look like, give it to God, and enjoy it.