Anticipation

Anticipation is … a pain. The worst part about anticipation is how you build it up in your own mind.

Science begs to differ. “Anticipation is often viewed as an emotional experience, an eager wait for something to happen. Inside the brain, the act of anticipating is an exercise in focus, a neural preparation that conveys important visual, auditory or tactile information about what’s to come.“

I’m beginning to wonder if the effects are different as you get older. Not only do you have the anticipation of something good or something bad, but you also have different experiences to draw from, memories of how things went, if it was positive or not. As that anticipation mounts, positive or negative, especially if it is in a group setting, the anticipation of what is coming begins to grow a life of its own, spiraling to larger effects than what possibly be coming.

I wonder if that is what we do with dreams and hopes for the future as we get older. As children it is common to have dreams to be several things when you grow up, perhaps a fireman and a ballerina while you are also looking for mummies in the desert. As we get older, however, those dreams starting pruning back, either because of reality, perhaps you are actually scared of mummies, or because someone older cautioned to keep your dreams simple or because you had something negative occur which you now apply to the rest of your life or dreams.

Does it happen when we first realize that idols may not actually live up to your expectations? Is it the first time you see an imitation Santa at a store? When do we start associating negative feelings to anticipation? Is that just dread? What does it say about the person when they look at the wonder in the stars and start catastrophizing the possibility of a star falling on them when they could focus on the beauty or the possibility of seeing more stars than anyone has ever seen? Is it a reality check or is it the negativity of their lives stealing all the different possibilities of joy out of their lives?

More importantly, how do we change this behavior? How do we find joy in anticipation again instead of worrying about the worst possible scenario?

And when the worst doesn’t happen, how do we learn to laugh at ourselves and crawl back to the positive possibilities?