High expectations

This week I cooked supper a couple of times. I made Indonesian shish-kabobs with vegetable stir-fry, rice and blueberry buckle when my Ecuadorian sisters came over. I cooked spaghetti and meatballs to take to a busy young mother and her family; I baked potato pizza and a quick ceaser salad for my parents and me. Yet I realized that when each meal was over, I would mentally check off the things that went wrong. The shish-kabobs tasted dry; the spaghetti had too much paste; the potatoes were too thick on the potato pizza. Instead of noting the things that had turned out well or resting in the affirmation that I recieved from my visitors, I ended up berating myself because it wasn't perfect.

I realized that this constant self-critique is not just confined to my cooking escapades but ends up being a bigger life pattern. I have these extremely high expectations that I place on myself and those close to me. When I leave a social gathering, I'll spend the trip home mulling over all the things that I wish I would not have said. When I look in the mirror, I zoom in on my worst features. When I play piano, I remember the scattered wrong notes instead of enjoying the melody. If I run four miles, I think I should have pushed myself to do five or six; if I get an A-, I'll spend days lamenting the loss of a "real" A.

Although high expectations can be good on occasion ("personal best" is in fact a lifelong guideline that we teach in elementary school), it seems as if these must be coupled with a healthy dose of grace and what a friend recently dubbed "self-kindness." So that's my quest for this week (one that I consider deeply spiritual)- to minimize the amount of time spent in mental belittling and chiding, to interrupt the negative self-talk, to linger in the moments where my strengths are evident. Initially this seems rather arrogant or at least self-indulgent; but when I think of the second commandment-you know the one where we are told to treat our neighbors like we treat ourselves- I'm not sure that my neighbor is looking for the kind of garbage I'm dumping on myself.