The choice is really no longer ours to make unless we can open our minds to whatever is happening in the moment and reject any expectations our mind wants to form. Expectations create pressure and conflict. When our minds conceive of an expectation, we feel pressure, either internal from ourselves or external from others. That pressure is on us to make the event or person live up to whatever expectations we have or that others have for us. That pressure causes conflict, especially when the pressure is purely external and conflicts with our own expectations, or lack thereof.
Failure is programmed into expectation.
We set ourselves up for failure by not having an open mind. This failure we feel when our expectations are not met leads to disappointment in ourselves or others, despair that anything can ever live up to our idealizations, fear that perhaps we are inadequate and to blame for this failure, and emotional pain. Whether we suffer from our own expectations or others it is the expectation that hurts. But it doesn t have to be this way. We do not have to live with unrealized expectations, failure, disappointment and hurt.