DW's Blog

The Story I Told Myself Before I Got There

by DW Green — May 21, 2026

“On expectations, two beautiful towns, and a brother who keeps teaching me.”“On expectations, two beautiful towns, and a brother who keeps teaching me.”

My older brother Mike was an art professor for most of his career. He has the eye and the temperament that goes with it — he sees things other people walk past, and when something captures him, he talks about it the way a poet talks about light. For years, the thing that captured him was Bend, Oregon.

To hear Mike tell it, Bend was paradise. The mountains. The light. The river running through town. The art scene, the food, the air, the people. I lost count of the times he described it over a long dinner or a quiet phone call. By the time I finally visited Bend myself, many years later, I had built an entire city in my head.

And then I got there.

Bend is, in fact, a beautiful town. Genuinely lovely. The mountains are real. The river is real. The people were kind. Everything Mike had said was, in the strictest sense, true.

And I was disappointed.

Not because Bend had failed. Bend hadn’t done anything. The problem was the version of Bend I had constructed in my imagination over years of Mike’s loving descriptions. No actual town could compete with the one I had already built. The real Bend wasn’t worse than the one in my head. It was just different. But because it was different, I experienced it as a letdown.

It took me a while to understand what had happened.

This past weekend my family gathered in McCall, Idaho for a reunion. Mike is in the later stages of dementia now. The brother who once described Bend with such precision can no longer hold the thread of a conversation. The reunion was, in many ways, a chance for the rest of us to be together while we still have him.

McCall had been built up for me the same way Bend was, though by different voices. Mike had spoken of it years ago, when he could still travel. My wife’s sister owns a place there and has raved about the area for years. My niece, through a long friendship with a local cabin owner, has spent many seasons there too. By the time we pulled into town, I had once again built a city in my head that no actual place could match.

And, predictably, for about an hour I felt that familiar small letdown. The streets weren’t *that* charming. The lake was beautiful but not *that* beautiful. The mountains were lovely but not the cathedral I had pictured.

Then the weekend started, and I forgot all about my expectations.

It snowed unexpectedly, and the youngest kids ran around outside losing their minds with joy. We sat with Mike. We told stories. We ate too much. I bought a pair of shoes at a grocery store because mine had blown out, which became its own running joke. My sisters laughed at things only sisters laugh at. There was a quiet moment, late one evening, that I will carry for the rest of my life.

By the time we drove out of McCall, I realized something important. The weekend had been one of the best in years. And the disappointment I had felt on arrival had nothing to do with McCall at all. McCall hadn’t underdelivered. My imagination had overdelivered, and the gap between the two had cost me an hour of presence I’ll never get back.

Expectations are strange things. We treat them as forecasts, but they’re not. A forecast is based on data. An expectation is mostly a story we tell ourselves, built from someone else’s words, our own moods, a few photos, and a lot of imagination. We then experience reality through the filter of that story, and we judge reality by how well it performs against something that was never real in the first place.

The Buddhists have a phrase for this kind of thinking: “mind-made.” Manufactured from thin air. No substance behind it. No basis in what’s actually in front of you. And yet we let these mind-made stories run the show, deciding in advance whether a town, a vacation, a meal, a meeting, or a person will be a hit or a miss before any of it has had a chance to happen.

Mike, in his prime, would have appreciated this idea. He spent a career teaching young artists to see what was actually in front of them — the real shadow, the real edge, the real color — rather than the idea of those things they carried in from outside. Painting from imagination is fine. But painting from imagination while pretending you’re painting from life is how bad work gets made. Now, in his dementia, he can no longer hold the lesson he taught. But the lesson holds him, in a way. He greets each moment without the burden of expectation, because the comparison machinery has gone quiet. He simply meets what is in front of him.

I am not romanticizing dementia. It is brutal. But there is something his condition has accidentally taught me: most of the suffering in any given hour of my life is the gap between what’s actually happening and what I had decided in advance should be happening.

Close the gap, and the hour becomes available again.

There’s a lesson in here for business too, if you want one. We build expectations into our customers’ minds with every piece of marketing, every promise, every photograph on a website. And then we either deliver against those expectations or we don’t. The companies people love most are not necessarily the ones that promise the most. They are the ones whose actual experience exceeds the story the customer brought in with them. The companies people quietly resent are the ones who oversold the story and underdelivered the experience. The map doesn’t match the territory, and the customer feels it.

On the personal side, the lesson is even simpler. The next town, the next trip, the next dinner, the next meeting, the next reunion — it will not be the thing you imagined. It will be something else. Almost certainly something better, if you let it. But only if you can set the imagined version down at the door and walk in empty-handed.

Bend was beautiful. McCall was beautiful. So was the weekend. So was every minute I spent with my brother, who taught me to see, and who is now — in his own way — teaching me to stop deciding in advance what I’m about to see.

That may be the last great lesson he ever gives me. And he gave it without saying a word. Mike has always been, to me, the role model for role models. He still is.