The team was ecstatic! We were going to have the penultimate escape experience according to fellow enthusiasts – one of the best escape rooms in the world. Because we have had experiences of getting excited and being disappointed before, not just in escape rooms, but in life, there was a swirl of emotions going on inside each of us. Do we allow ourselves to get excited, and open ourselves up for disappointment? Or do we maintain an inner calm, keep low expectations, and then hopefully have them blown away? We would like to say that we settled on one of the choices and went with it, but we continually bounced between the two. We are happy to report that the experience did not disappoint – the escape adventure truly did earn its place among the best in the world. The storyline was that we were taking part in a lab experiment on hallucinations and there were points where we felt like we were hallucinating.

We learned several lessons that day, the biggest one being a very human condition related to expectations. We know that we create our own experiences by the expectations that we set, so it is important that we are consciously aware of the expectations that we are setting for a given situation. We can knowingly choose to have high expectations understanding that they can be met or not met, leading to possible frustration, or letdown. We can also knowingly choose to have lower expectations that can be met or surpassed, potentially leading to a natural high and even happiness. The important thing to realize is that we have a choice, and we can make it with full understanding that we are creating the resulting emotions based on that choice.