Feet dangling at the ledge. Looking up. Looking down. Looking left, then right. Looking straight ahead.

We all face choices in life. Should we stay where we are? Should we take a new direction? Should we? Could we? Would we?

Choices don’t contain inherent risks, although we might think they do. Choices are merely decisions we make based on the knowledge we have at any given moment. Sometimes we make choices that bring us more joy. Sometimes we make choices that bring us a great deal of pain. No matter the decision, it brings us further, granting us wisdom about things we didn’t know before. Every action we take widens our pool of understanding.

Broadening our horizons is a limitless activity. What a marvelous thing it is to know that wisdom is an endless journey. How boring life would be if we had “everything figured out”. Imagine the predictability. Imagine never, ever experiencing disappointment again.

That used to sound like a great idea to me. As a young adult, I used to avoid disappointment like the plague. It was a hard emotion for me to manage. In some ways, it still is. But what I have learned over the years is simple: disappointment comes from thwarted expectations. We expect people to act in a way to which we are accustomed. We expect things to turn out “as they always have”. But just as we never quite wake up the same person who went to bed the night before (our cells are renewed, our energy is restored, our skin sheds, grows, breathes – you get the picture), each day is never quite the same as the one before it. Or the one after it for that matter.

We hold such great expectations about simply everything, from the way our soufflé should turn out to the results in the next Presidential race (okay – exception here: Please dear God. Listen to me on this one. No fluff-haired, baboon-faced man can or ever should be elected. We need someone who can run a country, not just his mouth.) And then things happen as they happen. We are sometimes left with our mouths agape (did she really just say that? Did he really just do that?). In that moment of surprise, we again are faced with a choice. We can either choose to be disappointed or find the humor in it. Or perhaps relief. Better to find out now about the true essence of a person than later when things could be much worse.

And then there’s the thing about growth and change and seeing things with different eyes. What I used to value as a teenager has little meaning to me now. I’d venture to guess you feel the same way. The point is we are constantly in motion. Why not move beyond disappointment from the realm of what might have been to the realm of what might be? Possibility is not expectation. It is merely the chance to try again. Or to decide again. And again. And again.