The Head and the Heart: Where Lies Your Allegiance?

I am trying to think of a way to wrap up my Fulbright-in-Brazil experience, and yet...where to start? If there is something that I have learned over the past year, it is the fine difference between expectations and hope. Entertain me for a bit as I play with the idea.

Expectations come from our head. Hope comes from our heart.

Expectations are fixed images of how things should turn out. They can be as concrete as a responsible 5-year plan. They can be dreamy, colorful, lofty images with the man and the house and the job all intricately designed already. You find yourself expecting the presentation to go perfectly smooth and the transition from one job to the next to give you just the right amount of vacation time in between. And yet these expectations can be, and are often, slaughtered in about half a second in any given moment. It is so easy to get lost in our minds with how we imagine a situation to turn out. I do it all too often. And all too often my expectations fall short.

Hope, a beautiful virtue, should not be confused with expectations. Although there can be an image or idea of how you'd like a situation to turn out, hope lies in the heart. Hope lies most freely in an open heart, where ideas, feelings, logics, and outcomes are malleable and come and go freely. Hope is open to change but stays consistent in the action of patience, in the action of a longing gaze forward for what is to come. Hope does not expect anything to happen but imagines the best.

Semana Santa in São João Del Rei, MG

The 10pm candlelit Mass in Berkeley was a very prayerful hour for me in the midst of the college craziness. I remember a very practical priest saying to us: "Patience is the action of hope. We are called to be hopeful people." That line has stayed with me to this day. And yet I don't think I fully understood it until I leaned on the virtue of hope these past nine months in Brazil. I gave myself the pep-talk of "no expectations" the months before leaving. During the nine months I had plenty of things come and go: opportunities, friendships, relationships, my family, ideas, future goals, conversations, trips, nights out, nights in, presentations, classes, stormy weather and -my personal favorite- the wifi in my apartment. Rather than using patience to keep hopeful, I learned that hope actually inspires patience. Patience results from the having of hope. Us hopeful beings thus act patiently.

As should be expected, people and situations are bound to fall short from time to time. In the failure, we can also find unexpected growth and healing. But that healing comes when we can empty our head, and open our hearts. If we can do that, we can change our expectations into hope and our forceful efforts seem to become more graceful. Our ambition morphs into a peaceful dance. Our dreams and aspirations become less significant as we patiently hope for whatever is greater to come, for whatever God may will.

Maybe this is vague for a wrap-up blog post for the last nine months. But I hope it is vague enough that you can apply the concept to your own life and see whether you are getting lost in a mind of expectations or relying on your open and hopeful heart. Either one is sure to bring growth in one way or another, but from my experience one way can be more disappointing than the other. Such is life!

Here are a few of my favorite photos from the trip: