Expectations help us plan, motivate, anticipate. They give structure to our days and meaning to our striving. Yet the same structures that steady us can also confine us. Expectations—our own or those placed on us—can quietly narrow our imagination, shrink our sense of possibility, or convince us that hope lives only on one particular path, one particular outcome, one particular version of ourselves.  Hope becomes conditional.  It has to “work out.”  It has to look a certain way. It becomes a transaction rather than a liberation.  But hope, real hope, is far more spacious than our expectations.