Through most of my life I’ve never been terribly good at managing expectations. Or rather I should say that my expectations tend to swing wildly from puppy dogs and sunshine to the absolute bleakness usually reserved for 19th century poets. And all of this over the span of five minutes. Sure, I’ve learned to mask both of them fairly reasonably, but still, that’s what’s going on behind the scenes. You learn at an early age that if you keep those kind of thoughts in check you can save yourself a good deal of trouble in the long run.

I like black and white, the known versus the unknown. Some people seem to have a natural capacity or even a bit of a love for the unknown. I’m not one of those. It’s strange and different and therefore scary. Far easier to retreat back to the comfort and ease of what we know.

Maybe I’ve chosen comfort and ease for so long that it’s really all I know for certain and it becomes my default setting. Perhaps, it’s time to to move beyond that. I really don’t know how the rest of the world deals with the dichotomy between blind optimism and abject pessimism. If there’s a trick I’ve got to learn it, because swinging from pillar to post is quite simply exhausting.