In Anticipation

So tonight is Sadie's first "job." Lily and I are taking her to a place called Gilda's Club less than a mile from our apartment, where the three of us will meet and play with children whose parents are undergoing treatment for cancer. We have been forewarned that many of their parents are dying, and that some of the children are under enormous strain. We have also been told that this is typically one of the most rewarding places to go with a therapy dog, as the children are so immediately and obviously enamored of the dogs.

I was planning to write today's entry after we got home. But all morning I have been thinking about our visit, and wondering what it will be like, and I think, instead, I'd like to write now, about anticipation. There is so much focus, I feel, in our society on the actual experience. We talk earnestly about living in the moment. I myself try to remember this when I am with my children, or older members of my family, and whenever I feel guilty about not doing more to record the experiences I am having. Although the records can trigger memories later on, it is the experiences themselves that leave the imprint that shapes our selves. But it cannot be denied that the reflection of an experience, after the fact, is an integral component of the whole, and that the anticipation of it, beforehand, is essential, too.

In fact, sometimes I wonder how profoundly anticipation has colored many of the significant, big-ticket events of my life, let alone the daily or more routine ones. In a way, I have been waiting for this evening's visit for several years, since Lily first commented on how excited the severely disabled adults on our block were whenever we walked by with Sadie and Scout. There was the idea, the research, the contact made with the organization, the deferrals of the course itself, the course, the graduation, the scheduling, and now--at last--the visit. Will it be anticlimactic? I don't think so, somehow. Will it be different than I expect it to be in a hundred ways? Yes. This, I have found to be true.

Anticipation is a way of being prepared, a good way of being prepared--not as productive, perhaps, as organizing, or packing, or strategizing. But in anticipating we are assuming our role in an experience, and assuming the impact the experience will have on us. In anticipating, we are participating, before, as well as during, and presumably afterward as well.

Instead of waiting until 9 o'clock at night, when I will have returned home, put an exhausted Lily to bed, and had no time to process therapy dog in action, I write now, when I am in a heightened state of looking forward, the place of the hopeful unknown. Which, all in all, is a pretty good place to be.