Looking forward less
I have a trip coming up, tomorrow actually. My flight leaves at nine in the morning—late enough that I don’t have to worry about sleeping in and missing it, but early enough that I won’t have to spend a large part of the day in anticipation.
I’ve been looking forward to this trip, but I’ve been playing the game of pushing it out of my mind to keep my excitement from building to an uncomfortable level, like when I was sent to my room as a kid, looking out the window and watching the other kids play, wanting to play with them, but knowing that I had to stay in my room for at least an hour, and only making the time pass slower by watching the other kids and letting the wanting build. At some point, I learned to distract myself. I would read comics.
Something else I learned, a little later, maybe around the time when I first fell in love, was to minimize my expectations. Their shoes just got so big that reality could never fill them. I walked around like a sad clown for most of when I was thirteen. We passed notes for the whole eighth-grade year, but then my best friend got her in the end. I still loved her all through high school, while most of the jocks had their turns.
It’s like telling a fishing story, “You want to know how big the fish was? Just guess!” Then they guess a length longer than the actual fish, which you thought was pretty long, but the length they’ve put out there is even longer, so you have to dejectedly say, “Well, no, it was actually only this many inches, but that’s still pretty big, right?” Wouldn’t it have been better if they had guessed a length, not so small as to arouse your suspicion, but small enough to certainly be less than the actual length?
So now I have two lines of defense. First, I try to think about the future as little as possible. Second, when the thought of an upcoming potential source of happiness makes it through the first line of defense, I diminish it, telling myself, “Oh, it will be fun, but not that fun.”
We are going to Leavenworth, Washington. I heard it’s a German town—great for hiking, pretzels, and beer. My buddies from college are flying in from all over the country—New York, D.C., Chicago, Denver, Houston, Dallas, San Diego. Some of them I haven’t seen for a couple of years. Nick got married. The cabin has a hot tub. I expect we will sit on the back deck and tell stories. Theirs will be better than any books I’ve read this year (and I read Nabokov this year). But alas, I am expecting now. I must not let the fish grow, not until it has been caught, filleted, and cooked. Only in my mouth, tomorrow, will I taste it, as it really is.