Anticipation is a beautiful thing...

 ...for it leaves you enthralled in a prelapsarian bliss. 

There is a sensation that stirs inside of you that is simply irreplaceable for anticipation grants your imagination absolute control over your body. It is incredible to experience the power your mind has over your physical form. You imagine your fears and insecurities. In this process, you truly feel them. These quixotic scenarios plague your body with frissons and qualms. Anxiety begets stress. Though these feelings bring about connotations of the negative variety for most, I interpret them in a very different way. For me, stress causes superlative awareness. It is a reckoning that makes me feel undoubtedly vibrant.  Moments of panic make the body experience a height of animation; heart pounding, senses vivid and mind racing. The ways in which adrenaline chemically manipulate my physiological capacity to engage is a glorious recognition of life; exhilaration at its finest.

While anticipation may be marked by sleepless evenings, it also possesses the potential for days filled with dreaming. There is a lovely joy in the fecundity of jocose flight of fancies; endlessly creating the possibilities of the future. I sigh at the thought of it as I write these words.

In these days of waiting, the myopic nature of the future causes a disconnect with the present. I do not mourn this detachment, for there is a relationship with the present that may only be experienced when you have neglected it for some time. Although my engagement with the present becomes wanton, I intend on experiencing it to the height of its capacity when I am there. For I know that when the day I have been waiting for arrives, I will be stilled. I know that in an instant, I will become so enthralled with my environment that I will enjoy a consciousness unlike any other. I will be reacquainting myself with the present.

It has missed me. It embraces me with a fondness and offers to me all that I have been dismissing: absolute immersion with the moment.

To hang on each instant.

To absorb all it can offer.

It will instill in me all the beautiful joys it possesses.

It is waiting for me. In contrast, as per all those who endure anticipation, I just can’t wait! 

-Ashley