I ran into a friend of mine from high school, Attar, today. We got to talking about careers and stuff. He's working in internal medicine and his sister is also a doctor now. I told him that I was in graduate school, studying to become a high school biology teacher. We started talking about a biology teacher we both had. I was really surprised by what he had to say. I had a very positive experience with this teacher, who was also the coach of my Scholastic Bowl team. But he told me about a time when this teacher made his sister cry for days by telling her that she would never be able to become a doctor, which was her childhood dream. She said that she knew the work and effort it took to become a doctor and that she was incapable of it. It turns out that this teacher had also once wanted to become a doctor, but for one reason or another, she ended up teaching instead.

I guess the lesson I can draw from this is that people are very complex. People have many dimensions. Most people are not simply good or bad, but a mixture of both. Good people do bad things and bad people do good things. Good people do mediocre things and mediocre people sometimes do extraordinary things. I can't understand why this teacher would tell a student to give up on her dream. Maybe she was thinking she was being kind by sparing her student the humiliation of failure. But shouldn't a teacher have the highest expectations and hopes for his or her students? Her job was to inspire, to encourage, not to discourage. I don't know all the details of the relationship between this particular teacher and student. Still, I never want to be the type of teacher that tells students that they can't achieve, that they are doomed. I can't imagine where I would be today if my teachers had treated me that way.

On Wednesday night, I learned an important life lesson. It's a true secret to happiness. I wish I could say that it came out of my own experience and reflection. That's not how I learned it. Instead I heard it from Mufti Azeemuddin Ahmed, a very wise man.

Are you ready for it? This is some really profound stuff.

Here it is: Don't expect anything from anybody.

At first, this might not sound that impressive. In fact, it sounds very negative. But in a way, it's very positive. Think about it though. Isn't a lot of disappointment in life cause by expectations, by false hopes? You come to someone expecting something and they don't deliver. Or you go someplace, expecting it to be so fun, and it really isn't.

Let's flesh this out with some examples. Say it's your first day at a new job. You go there expecting people to be very friendly. You anticipate that they'll show you the ropes. You expect them to help you make friends. You expect them to help ease your transition into your new surroundings. Well suppose none of that happens. How would you feel then? Pretty bad, right? But what if, you didn't expect so much? What if you had expected nothing? If you hadn't expected people to help you, you wouldn't be so disappointed when they didn't help you.

Are you starting to see the wisdom behind the statement?

Here's another example, one that the Mufti gave. Say you're a newlywed bride. You just marred this guy. You expect nothing out of him. Every night you make dinner for him. He eats it, but he says nothing. Then one night he says, "Hey honey, this time you didn't ruin it with too much salt. Nice job." Think about how good you'd feel. You weren't expecting anything, but you got a compliment, albeit a left-handed one.

P.S. - The song that I'm "currently listenting to," Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah," is amazing.And I discovered it by watching American Idol. Weird.