Anticipation

Anticipation

          Do you remember those ketchup commercials that wanted to highlight the thickness of their product?  It was for Heinz ketchup, the Hertz Rent-a-car of the ketchup world.  The music of Carly Simon played loudly with her slightly altered lyrics (which I believe she herself sang) made the ketchup people’s point. “Anticipation. Is makin’ me late. Is keepin’ me waitin’!”  This 3:16 song was written, as most songs, it seems, as a love song.  Someone misses someone and wishes they were together, so they sit on a tour bus or private plane and scratch out some lyrics either with a melody in their head or not.  Carly Simon is no dope and I imagine getting on her wrong side is painful.  Just ask “You’re so vain” James Taylor.  But being as smart as she is, she ended her little “I miss you” ditty with a very meaningful line, “And stay right here ’cause these are the good old days. These are the good old days.”

          I thought about this song because I am leaving for a visit to San Diego in a few days, just as last week I was looking forward to a weekend in Ithaca.  It is August in the City and the weeks are hot and short as we push through to Labor Day. I am a big believer in layering in things in my life to look forward to.  Kim and I often say that we enjoy the planning and anticipating of a trip as much as the actual trip.  There is a positive aspect of that in that we are getting more bang for our buck, or more accurately, more bang for our time.  Anticipating a week for a week and remembering a week for another week, makes the event last three weeks rather than one.  I think its all about getting the most out of what we have.  The question that the last line of Carly’s song raises is whether that is a good approach or not.

          The question becomes, does living in the moment and getting the most out of the moment mean that we should not waste our time anticipating the future?  Are these “good old days” being somehow impaired by daydreaming about next week or remembering last week?  I can probably take either side of this debate, so I will try a pro/con approach.

          Anything that makes us feel good or gives us a positive outlook is, by definition, a good thing.  Every moment is a blend of past, present and future.  It would be naïve to think that we only concentrate on the here and now.  In fact, an important human capability is the ability to contemplate all the elements of time and to keep them in perspective.  A dog only knows you are there in the moment.  He barely remembers the past moment and can’t possibly anticipate the future, or at least not very far into the future.  Our dog anticipates our departure and gets moody.  He cannot conceive of our future return.  He also has little or no sense of the passage of time, probably because he lives in the here and now.  When you leave a child, you tell him/her that we’ll have a good time when you return.  That anticipation helps the child because he/she can grasp that a good event awaits them.  I posit that anticipation and memory help us enjoy the present even more.

          Happiness experts (yes, they seem to exist) suggest that the key to happiness is to not focus on the past or the future, but rather to stay in the here and now.  I saw that when I toured the Coca-Cola Happiness Center at Coca-Cola World in Atlanta. They suggest that there is far more pleasure in enjoying what is before you in the moment than to belabor the past or struggle with the anticipation of future events.  There is somehow the sense that the pleasure of the moment is superior to the pleasure of one’s memories or the pleasure of the vision of the future.  The only argument I can give to support that is that if the present is consumed by the past and the future, then the next moment will lack the benefit of yet another memory of something positive that was done or accomplished.  But wait a minute, doesn’t the “live in the present” theory suggest that we don’t need or want memories, even on an accumulated basis, but prefer current activities?  And the only way to avoid anticipation is to avoid planning, such that all our activities are random or planned by others.  I grant you that some people like spontaneity in the extreme, but I suspect that most people prefer a more structured existence that builds in some amount of anticipation.

          I guess I am prone to debunking the view of happiness experts because I can’t even get a good pro/con going since I believe that came out as pro/con/pro when it comes to anticipation.  But let me modify that a bit.  If you spend all your present on the past and the future, you are, indeed letting your life slip by unlived.  That would clearly not be good.  What you obviously need to do is live in the past, present and future simultaneously.  If I were postulating a formula, I would suggest 60% on the present, 25% on the future (anticipation) and 15% on the past (memories).  I would furthermore suggest that those percentages shift as we age, most likely with memories growing with importance and allocation as we age and have less energy to do things in the here, now and future.  If we are 100% about memories, we are probably dead or about to be dead.

          As I run with this theorizing, I think I may have stumbled on one of those Ponce de Leon moments.  Maybe one of the secrets to a longer life is to dwell as little on the past as possible and as much as possible on the future.  Could it be that simple?  Perhaps its much easier to say than do.  None of us is so time-flexible that we can will ourselves to spend our time as we direct.  We do things like plan trips to trick ourselves into future-thinking.  We take photos and make memory/scrap books to force ourselves to capture and remember the past.  We perhaps even go to movies or concerts to remove ourselves from the present (I can’t yet decide if that is positive or negative).

          I think we are on to something here.  While time travel may be forever relegated to science fiction, time manipulation may be a real thing when thought of as the purposeful blending of past, present and future into one’s ongoing consciousness. And if you can manage or manipulate your time you may be doing so to the benefit or detriment of your level of happiness.  I am unclear whether such a contrived approach to life management is advisable.  I can think of many people who try to over-manage their time and they never seem happy.  People who let their time get away from them are also plentiful and seem less than fulfilled.  The people who seem happiest are those who either internalize their approach to time management or just do it instinctively.  That troubles me a bit because it presumes that the tendency towards happiness is an innate attribute and not so much a learned behavior. 

          There I go again, building in anticipation.  This time it is about checking in with 23andMe to see if in addition to my predisposition towards being a performance athlete, I am predisposed towards being a happy performance athlete. Does anyone audit 23andMe about this stuff?  It can’t all be just a marketing ploy, can it? Remind me to check my cynicism index.