Expectations. As life trudges along the mind gets a better and better sense of "the way things are." We know what it feels like to eat, what it feels like to get up after "too little rest," what a twelve inch powder is like etc. Sure it is our memory and maybe unavoidable in that sense, but what would it feel like to taste ice cream for the first time again? Or see the sun for the first time? It seems like as soon as we pop out the womb we are getting ideas in our head about the "way things are." And thus a reality forms in which we find pleasure in somethings, and pain in others.
Everyday becomes the same. We do the same things because they give us pleasure (or because "we have to") and they give us more or less the same experience. Have you ever fallen in love with a CD or a song and so you listen to all the time and eventually it stops making it feel the way you used to? You expect it to make you feel like it did the first time you heard it; low and behold when you hear those lines "and all you touch and all you see, is all your life will ever be!" you don't feel the same way. Instead of cherishing that moment for what it is, I compare it to the last time I had that experience. Instead of becoming totally immersed in an experience, we tend to only enjoy it in regards to how much better or worse it was than the last time we experienced it. Another example is when you friend tells how great a movie is, you finally go see it and then it turns out what you thought it was going to be like was eons better than it actually was. With no expectations, no preconceptions, every experience would be new and thus exciting. With no expectations we are sure to be dazzled. And every experience would be taken not as better or worse, but just as an experience with infinite more power than no experience at all.
