Do you have the expectations of a mouse?

I suspect I know what you’re thinking.

“Spare me the cod philosophy, Giles… what is it, I should have the expectations of a lion, not a mouse, yeah? I need to think BIG, is that what you’re angling for?”

Nah. I’m not really one for cod philosophy. And I’m talking about a very specific mouse.

Stuart Little, the protagonist of E.B.White’s 1945 eponymous children’s novel. Me and my almost 5 year old daughter have just finished reading it together and I want you to avoid an easy trap this little mouse fell into.

(LOL, I really need to stop it with these puns.)

It’s a funny old book, have you read it? We got there via Charlotte’s Web, which was wonderful and poignant and I confess I was mildly disappointed that the girl didn’t dissolve in floods of tears at the ending, just as I did, all those years ago.

She’s clearly less soppy than me.

Anyway, the first half of the book is a series of unconnected, madcap events: life, through the eyes of a 2-inch-high talking mouse-boy. So, getting rolled up in the living room blinds; being imprisoned in the fridge; finding himself thrown out with the rubbish, that sort of thing. A nice bit of slapstick for the child.

A succession of things happening to him. Circumstances out of his control. (Like I say: life.) He copes with each, admirably, and we warm to his character, relating to the calm, easy-going manner he exhibits, that we’ve all experienced for ourselves on our better days.

It being a kids’ book, Stuart maintains this carefree, tolerant attitude from chapter to chapter.

Which makes the ending all the more jarring.

The best laid plans of mice…

The second half has more of a story – he goes on a quest to find his missing best friend Margalot (a bird, who’s flown North in the summer heat).

Sure, he still has adventures, but they’re interwoven into a broader narrative that feels like it’s building to something. In the penultimate chapter he arrives in a small town where he discovers there lives a 2-inch-high girl, Miss Ames, whom he spies at the post office and instantly falls for.

He writes her a letter, inviting her on a canoeing date with him the next day. She accepts.

And here’s where his thinking gets the better of him. He’s so excited about his date, he sets his expectations somewhere up in the stratosphere, spending a whole day fitting out the tiny toy canoe ‘just so’, then daydreaming about how amazingly fantabulous his time with Miss Ames will inevitably be.

Yet, unbeknownst to him, while he dozes, some full-sized boys discover his toy boat, play with it for a while and mostly trash it. Not beyond repair, but certainly to a standard well beneath the shiny slice of perfection the little mouse had planned for his date.

Now, he’d done so well up to this point, but here, it all unravels for our hero. You see, he simply can’t get over it. When the stakes are at their highest, his natural, clear-thinking nature—that we’ve enjoyed through the rest of the book—is suddenly swamped by fretful thought.

Nothing is right. None of it is how he wants it. The date can’t possibly go ahead under these substandard conditions, because he knows how it should (🚩) be ‘in order to’ succeed, and it’s not matching up.

(This despite the fact the girl of his dreams is sat right next to him, stating that she just doesn’t care, offering a raft of common sense suggestions as to how they could make it work 🤦🏻‍♂️)

So their time together just kind of fizzles. She goes home. He gives up. The book ends and (frustratingly, for a parent reading it to a child), nothing is resolved. An opportunity missed. A call to adventure ignored, because it was stifled by conditions.

(This was apparently very deliberate on the part of E.B. White, who made the point that life itself rarely gives you the satisfaction of a neatly tied-up story. Let's remember, this is the guy that killed off the heroine at the end of his previous book.)

Ring any bells?

How many times have you had a picture in your head as to how things should (🚩) be in order to succeed? And given up—or, more likely, not even started—when they weren't?

Let an idea fizzle.

Been disappointed by the way things have, or haven’t, turned out.

How often do you break your own heart by creating a personal set of rules as to what needs to be in place before you make changes or see ‘results’? By having the expectations of this little misguided mouse?

Hey, for the record, you’re not alone! I’ve procrastinated on living, at times for years on end, convinced things need to be ‘just so’ before I could begin working towards what I truly want. Waiting for my stars to align, or to have very specific boxes ticked.

So I get it.

But I understand it now, and I won’t be stopped by it any more. I’m willing to break my own ‘rules’ (which are in fact the rules of the Giles Ego Construct 📦) in order to follow authentic desires.

And you can too. If you choose to let go of the need to control how things ‘should’ (🚩) be.

I shall leave you with a quote from the late, great Richard Carlson, one of the earliest proponents of living from the inside-out, and the father of Not Sweating the Small Stuff:

“When you let go of your expectations, when you accept life as it is, you’re free. To hold on is to be serious and uptight. To let go is to lighten up.”

Yes. Let go and lighten up.

Run free, little mouse, run free!

🐁

Giles