--Step

I was doing one last Facebook crawl late one night recently, my eyes heavy.  I had posted a picture of a Columbia House CD catalogue from back in the day...11 CDs for a penny, with an obligation to buy eight or ten more (I don't remember) over an ensuing period. Great deal at the time, and made better because my parents actually let me pick a couple of the CDs. So I wrote: 

I am blessed with so many erudite and thoughtful friends, defined in Ken-world as "people who are willing to put up with me". I'm unlikely to ever meet my friend Karen, for example, but she finds me amusing -- and "grumpy" (said with affection) -- and, well, there are people I see and talk to every day to whom I am amusingly grumpy, or perhaps grumpily amusing. Routinely she drops little wisdom nuggets in comments to Breadbin posts, or on my Facebook wall. She has enriched my life.

So has Sky, who actually chances to live in the same city as I do, and who, as such, I have spent some time with. Not enough, not near enough, she's one of those people who devotes herself fully to the world, with time off devoted fully to herself to recharge. Coordinating schedules is a challenge. But she, too, engages my mind numerous ways in every contact, and she often seems to toss off profundities without thought or effort.  

Like this one:

Now I'm awake.

__________

Someone I love called me out, might even have been the same day, for a post detailing some of the latest world developments and how I thought things might progress from here. I don't have much Hope for a soft landing; nothing I have seen from our esteemed (?) political leaders (???) indicates they are in any way equipped to mitigate a single one of the many, many multifaceted and protracted problems, predicaments, and calamities we are facing. Indeed, to a man (they're always men), they'd much rather make money by the millions while the world burns. 

It's fucking depressing, is what it is, and I have striven to balance that hopelessness with humour and a bringing-together in my virtual space. Not always successfully. Sometimes the world takes too big a bite of me and I lose hope altogether for a while. Sometimes I'm really distraught, and that's when you'll find fifteen stupid posts on my wall in the space of an hour. That's my father in me coming out: when things get too dark, reach for the jokes and yank those fuckers with both hands.

Sky's idle question really got me thinking. Because "anticipation" used to be baked in to so many life experiences little and large, and I feel almost as if some nebulous somebody somewhere decided Anticipation sucked, and tried to eliminate it as much as possible.

When I was a kid, when the phone rang, you had NO IDEA who was calling you. I wonder who that could be? The odds of it being a call you WANTED to take were a lot higher than they are today, of course, since only bots use phones as phones these days...but the anticipation remained. 

If your favourite group came out with a new album, you might get a teaser on the radio (if the genre of music was radio-friendly), but to actually hear it in its entirety you had to put clothes on, leave the house, go to a store, lay down money, and AT BEST you'd be able to rock out in the car or on your Walkman on the way home. Now? Takes three clicks of a mouse and you can do it buck naked if you want.

Movies, too: remember Blockbuster? Picking out a video to rent used to be part of the experience! Hell, you'd go in there having no idea what was even there. What's interesting to me in this day of streaming is that practically every movie and show ever made is available on demand somewhere: it's just a matter of paying ten bucks a month to the exact right company. 

I'm told there are still a few shows that release episodes every week, but most vomit up entire seasons for viewers to gorge on episode-shaped chunks.  (Sorry, not a fan of television as a medium, it's so....damned...passive.) Binge watching satiates, of course, and I'm by no means religious, but I do think gluttony was called a sin for a very good reason. It's a grave sin across several philosophies as well, because it is fundamentally unbalanced.

It's not as if anticipation is gone entirely. You can still look forward to your work breaks, lunch, and of course home time; the weekend; the vacation you've got coming up in less than six weeks (!!!!); seeing your family and your friends. Ordering something online can spike anticipation to the moon. So don't go thinking it's vanished. But it strikes me that where it has vanished is where risk is involved, even tiny, subjective risk. If you don't like that new album, you're not out anything, not even money. Your phone shows the number of the person calling you, so you're spared any unwanted calls. You can listen to thirty seconds of every song in any album in all creation and if you don't like it you've lost that time and nothing else.  That's a good thing...or is it?

Aside from limiting anticipation, limiting risk does limit disappointment, and on the surface that's a laudable goal, right? Except not all disappointments can be avoided, and if you don't experience disappointment regularly, you don't learn how to process it. It undoes you, every time. I've experienced enough disappointment in my life that I've learned to reframe the word, to insert a hyphen. I had an appointment to see or experience something (even if that wasn't written anywhere) and I was "dis-appointed". So maybe there'll be some other time. Or maybe I'll find something I didn't even know was there that works out better. I'm pretty good at little hopes like that. Grander hopes, like that everything will work out for the best...yeah, I'm having some trouble with those.

So I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but that has never stopped me from sallying forth in the past, has it?

You look up anticipation in the thesaurus and the only synonym that really fits is hopefulness. You'll see "prediction", which is wrong and a tad arrogant, and expectancy, which carries the weight of a ripening resentment; also excitement and suspense, which don't feel quite right to me in ways hard to articulate. Like,  yes, those are both components, but excitement feels too loud to me and suspense too potentially frightening to describe anticipation. Or perhaps I feel anticipation differently from others. I can't discount that possibility. 

There's also the very important concept of non-attachment here: a hope, even an ephemeral whiff of an anticipation, is a declaration of some amount of attachment to an outcome. And contrary to all of what Mother Culture yammers in your ear, attachment is not healthy. 

The same woman, Sky, gently suggested to me that compassion is perhaps better than empathy. The difference, she said, was that compassion was a practice, while empathy was a surfeit of emotion. Also, I got the distinct sense compassion was lighter, less attached, simply accepting what's in front of me with good grace. I felt like this tied into anticipation as opposed to hope. Hope is both bigger and smaller than anticipation: it's also less personal...less attached.

I wonder how much of this actually does concern risk.

Anticipation isn't always positive, of course. You can anticipate trouble: that's called dread, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy more often than not. I noted above that we as a society have been busily removing little risks of all kinds since I was a kid, even as the big risks gather and coalesce around us. I find myself wondering if the removal of little dreads to anticipate has made it harder for people to imagine and prepare for large-scale troubles.

I would implore everyone reading this to pay attention to the little things in life, both the little joys and the little pains. Nurture anticipation, but don't become attached to an outcome, if that makes sense. You do that by greeting each moment as a blessing, even if it's painful. If you don't recognize pain as a blessing, I don't blame you! But it can be viewed that way, and viewing it that way takes some of its sting out. If it's a pain you can do something about, do something about it; if it isn't, you can still take that pain and help others going through the same or similar pains. 

And I know it's dark outside and getting darker every day. Hold fast to hope, because without that, we've given up and all is lost.

Love to all.