I find myself pondering this curious phenomenon where our expectations, like seeds cast into fertile soil, grow into the very realities we had merely imagined. The sociologist Robert Merton gave it a name—the self-fulfilling prophecy—but the thing itself is as old as human consciousness, as familiar as the morning sun that rises because we expect it to, or perhaps because our expectation is so deeply woven into the fabric of existence that we cannot tell where anticipation ends and reality begins.