My Expectations Past And Present

Even when I was quite young I got to thinking that if there were millions and millions of people in the world, I couldn’t just be like one little ant in a huge nest, I had to have been put here on Earth for some reason.

 It’s quite a logical assumption if you think about it. We are born, we live our lives, we die, and most people leave no lasting legacy behind them.  To believe that you are pretty insignificant in the scheme of things is rather depressing, even to a child, and so I always imagined that I was here for a purpose, although I had no idea what.

 It used to be that I thought I would have some religious purpose, but these days logic tells me not to believe everything that I am told literally, and my studies of ancient history and the writings of Zecharia Sitchin amongst others have left me seeing the religions of the world as little more than a way of controlling the masses and keeping them in order.

 There wasn’t a schoolboy in England when I was growing up who hadn’t heard of the famous signal flown on HMS Victory by Admiral Horatio Nelson before the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, “England Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty”.

I somewhat expected that one day when I was grown up I would either do something or invent something that would make me famous, or at least noteworthy, but alas although my career in the computer industry went up pretty fast, it then flattened out and slowly but surely went downhill, IT becoming a much tougher field to work in as technology advanced and the competitors for jobs got younger.

 When I hear the word “Expectations” it also reminds me of the Charles Dickens novel “Great Expectations”, which although I have never read it, there is an old black and white movie that gave me the creeps, where the hero “Pip” meets an escaped convict in a graveyard, and also Miss Haversham in her wedding dress, and the dining room full of cobwebs, ready for a banquet that would never come.  Those visions gave me bad dreams for years.

But now that time has passed on, my expectations of doing something outstanding in my life have become virtually a dream that never came true.

Here I am going on closer to sixty than I am to fifty, married for the third time, and financially worse off than I have ever been in my life.  Child support for my two daughters who I love dearly, takes almost half of my earnings, and by the same token makes it almost impossible for me to even visit them even once a year because I don’t have the money.

 With the need to continue to pay out a significant amount every month until they both reach 18, I am faced with having to work until I am sixty eight, unless by some miracle we win the lottery or my attempts to earn a living online begin to pay off in a big way.

 What were once great expectations have now become pipe dreams, the hope that I can find a winning formula for earning money from my web sites and other enterprises, or that the book I am trying to work on will become a best seller one day, although at this point I am still trying to research the content.

 I do believe that dreams and expectations change over time for most of us, but even though dreams can often fade, there is always the fleeting chance that some of them will come true.

 Five years ago this did happen to me, and I did find my soul mate, someone who understands me and who makes me happier than I have ever been before.  Now all I have to do is to find the answer to my financial dreams and know that our future is more secure as we both reach retirement.

 This article was a project for the week for GBE2 (Global Blogging Experience) and was based on the word “Expectations”.