Brain Food #742
Allowing ourselves to be surprised
Thoughts of the day
A thread of thought that I always seem to come back to is how all disappointments in life are the result of our expectations. We will never find what we expect. We will only find what is there.
The thought that we are bound to be disappointed, that our expectations will never be met, may be a demoralising one, but it can also be liberating, suggesting that happiness and fulfillment can exist when we allow ourselves to be surprised.
On his trip to Rome, German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe expresses his own disappointment at seeing ruins where he expected to encounter the grandiosity of one of history’s largest empires, the beauty of the classical past. He asks the stones to speak to him, but in return he receives silence.
From the Roman Elegies
Tell me you stones, O speak, you towering palaces!
Streets, say a word! Spirit of this place, are you dumb?
All things are alive in your sacred walls
eternal Rome, only for me all’s still.
In the end, he is impressed and surprised by the city of Naples, which he perhaps visited without having any expectations at all:
“Naples is a paradise; everyone lives in a state of intoxicated self-forgetfulness, myself included. I seem to be a completely different person whom I hardly recognise. Yesterday I thought to myself: Either you were mad before, or you are mad now.”
Comparing Rome to Naples, he concludes:
“In Rome I was glad to study: here I want only to live, forgetting myself and the world.”
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