Expectation

Never force anyone to make decisions according to your own expectations and dreams. Every human being has their own thoughts and places of happiness within them. These will not align with yours, and this is natural. Nature teaches every creature to create its own world of happiness. All comfort lies in being able to live in that world. At the end of each day, everyone takes stock of how much they were able to live in their own dream life, in their own way. If they cannot, they suffer greatly—something they can never show anyone. Living then becomes nothing more than mere habit for them. But you won’t notice this much. Because you have forced them to live according to your dreams. The funny thing is, you sit there believing you’re doing this for their good, because you know that if they live that way, they’ll be well. You think what they think, what they do—it’s all wrong. Well, how do you know they’re wrong? You cannot pass sweeping judgments about everyone based on your past experiences or what you’ve heard and borrowed from the world around you. Why must what is good for you necessarily be good for everyone? Have you ever tried living in someone else’s life, the way they do? When thinking about someone else, you must think like them, not like yourself.

Please don’t pick up that dog lying by the roadside dustbin and bring it into your air-conditioned room out of some infinite sense of compassion, thinking it will sleep better there. Believe me, it is perfectly happy right where it is. You cannot determine someone’s equation for happiness. Because you have never lived in their life to know how it feels good to live in it. Just because they cannot break the invisible wall of love or obligation toward you, you cannot force a person day after day to live according to your expectations. It’s a crime! You’re deciding their address for happiness your way, not their way. In doing this, you’re actually using their life as payment to find your own address for happiness at their expense. Hiding pain within their chest, they accept your imposed decisions with a smiling face and simply survive day after day by eating.

No one can say who will leave this world when or how. Everyone has the right to live their own way before death. If a person lives in your constructed world just for you, just to bring a smile to your face, because they cannot say ‘no’ to you directly, and you become happy thinking that they are well—this is how people stay well—then I will say you are nothing but a selfish person. The world of happiness you want to force them to live in is a world of happiness created in your own imagination, not theirs. Each person’s world of happiness looks different. And you have not been given the right to call any of them wrong, as long as that world is not destroying your world. Your world is beautiful—why should their world be ugly? Why must their world be arranged just like yours? You don’t have to live in it; they do. Why are you forcing them to bind their own life to a pattern created in your imagination? If you do this, and they drag their life through that pattern, then I will say you have murdered their inner self very cruelly. They could not truly live before death. For this, you—you and only you—are responsible! Please don’t cry for them after their death, feeling sorrow. Your tears are extremely ugly and meaningless. When they were alive, you didn’t think of them, didn’t cry for them. Dead people cannot hear the sound of crying, cannot see tears. Everyone around will think, “Ah! When they were alive, you thought of them so much, even after their death you are overwhelmed with grief.” But if no one else knows, the Creator knows how much they lived like the walking dead, spending their life in the unbearable grammar of happiness in your personal pattern! They are now a happy dead person who sleeps peacefully, having escaped your grasp. Please don’t make their sleep sorrowful with the meaningless water designs of your tears!

As long as they are alive, everyone should be given the opportunity to live their own way. Otherwise, a regret will remain in the chest before death—”As long as I lived, I could not live my own way.” Think for a moment about those whose words influence you to not let someone live their own way—do these regrets before death affect them at all? You may never know these regrets. If you knew, if you could feel them even a little, you would curl up in agony! Every living being should be allowed to live in their own way. Dogs, cats, cows, goats, humans—whatever they may be. Not everyone wants to eat everything, not everyone wants to go everywhere, not everyone wants to do every job. Not everyone wants to be the best. Why should everyone want to poison their life with the strain of being the best? Some don’t want to become anything—like Amalkanti, they just want to be sunlight. They will spend their life being that sparkling sunlight. Let them spend it a little like that! Life is short! Where each person finds happiness, despite everything else, they want to stay there until the end. This is natural; expecting otherwise is madness. They are crazy and you are not? Good point. Let them stay with all their madness in their own way! Who knows, your sanity might seem like madness to them. Behind such beliefs, they have thousands of reasons too. But they’re not making your life burdensome with the weight of all those reasons. Then why are you doing that? Who in this world is not crazy? Every crazy person has their own kingdom. In that kingdom, they are not crazy—they are the king. Why should one king live shamelessly in another king’s kingdom? Let all the crazy people of the world be happy in their own way with all their various meaningless madness.

There is nothing in this world that “should be desired.” Today could be anyone’s last day. If they cannot live their own way on this day because of fulfilling your dreams, isn’t that responsibility yours? People understand everything, but they understand it late. We had a teacher at our school, Harisadhan Dutta. I haven’t seen many people as scholarly in English as he was. In Chittagong’s regional language, he often told us, “Listen, you don’t understand—fish don’t recognize nets, and humans don’t recognize time.” At the same time in the same environment, different people live in different ways. Your well-being is about rain, mine is about sunshine, and theirs? Whether it’s rain or sunshine, they are well. By what right do you say, “Only staying with rain is well-being! Everything else is nonsense, fake, rubbish!” If you live with such a made-up thought, you are truly some kind of terrible person! You truly don’t know that by trapping people in the snares of your personal equations for well-being, you are unknowingly strangling someone’s well-being to death! Yes, you are a murderer, you are a murderer, you are a murderer!

The most decrepit word in the world is: expectation. The moment this begins to be born within a person, from that moment they enter old age. Expectation is only good as long as it doesn’t poison someone else’s life or force them to think like you. People age not under the weight of years, but under the weight of expectations from others.