It’s pretty easy to build an expectation for something in anyone’s life. Quite often I’ve done it myself and unfortunately, on many of those occasions that I have, I’ve also become overly resentful when they’re not met. Thankfully, I faced a situation recently with my roommate that I believe will help me prevent this from happening a lot less in my life.
The situation with my roommate (who’s also the landlord) was about a parking issue at his home of which I am renting a room within. In a previous entry I made a slight mention to what this issue was about. There’s an oddly shaped tree which mostly hangs over the half of the driveway I was given to park my car in when I moved in. While the tree is shaped beautifully and has strikingly colorful, white flowers in the spring, it also allures many birds to perch upon its branches and poop constantly. So unfortunately, throughout much of the year, my desire to maintain a clean and shiny car gets covered with long streaks of white bird fecal remains. In my first year of tenancy, this wasn’t an issue because my roommate had allowed me to park on the other side of the driveway and said he didn’t really care about the bird pooping issue on his own car. Somewhere along the line though, his tune changed and he took his original space back. My car then returned to the bulls-eye for every bird in that tree who decides to go to the little birdie’s room. About a month ago, I began asking my roommate for compromises to prevent this from happening.
Through our discussions, I learned the tree couldn’t be cut down due to it being more on the neighbor’s property. I learned he didn’t want to park in tandem and have to deal with moving cars around constantly. I also learned he didn’t wish to elongate the driveway into the backyard by losing ten feet of grass either. When I had asked him what his suggestion was, his answer had been to go get a car cover which did nothing more than make me extremely resentful towards him. What I wasn’t seeing was how those resentments were my own doing based upon expectations I had within myself on the situation. A few days ago, there was a final discussion over this issue where I finally saw those expectations and how they were creating the resentments I was feeling.
I had spent most of the day, prior to him coming home from work, helping him out with some things around the house. During it, I had come up with another idea of how to handle the parking situation. Most of that afternoon, I built up an expectation that he had to go for this option, especially since it seemingly in my own brain met all his requirements. Even more so, I figured he would be more apt to say yes due to the amount of things I had done for him earlier in that day.
Boy was I wrong…
While my roommate was quite appreciative of all the hard work I had done around the house, it didn’t translate into him agreeing to the idea I had pondered all day on how we could both park without being a target for bird poop. When my expectation that he would agree was not met, I once again proceeded to get very extremely angry and resentful at him and went out for a drive. There was only one thing I could do to calm down. I parked in a plaza nearby, bowed my head, and prayed to God. I prayed for love, forgiveness, and peace for the situation, for my roommate, and for me. Because of those prayers, over the next few hours, I felt a lot better and saw things very differently and with a more level head.
I could have been more grateful that I have at least been guaranteed an off street parking spot since first moving in, as there is no place to do so along the tiny street in front of his home. I also could have been less manipulative in my attempts to talk about the issue, instead of trying to use any work I had done for him as a bargaining chip to fuel my compromise. But most importantly, the bottom line is that I had spent all day in my head seeing him agree to this compromise. I had used my own thought patterns surrounding it and built an expectation that he had to agree to it. And when he didn’t, my ego took a blow and an argument ensued.
What’s ironic is that after I had prayed and been able to calm down, I returned home to find my roommate had already taken some time to research alternatives on how to deal with the issue. He ended up going and buying some plastic snakes to put in the tree’s branches which supposedly might help ward off those pesky birds. And he was wiling to park a little more forward thus allowing me to park a little further away from the overhang of the tree’s branches.
While I’m grateful that there’s a good chance one of these solutions will work, what I’ve realized from this situation is that the anger in my life surrounding an issue can often be based upon expectations I created in the first place. Sometimes it’s best to just take a moment and breathe, and then do a little praying to be able to see things like that a little more clearly. Because I did so, I gained a little more wisdom in my life and saw another way of how I can avoid becoming resentful down the road.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson