Day 45 Lenten Meditation: Anticipation

Sometimes when we anticipate, we wait for good things to happen. Sometimes it’s a matter of what we’ve earned through hard work, what we will be gifted with through tradition, or what we’ve been promised. We know something good is coming, although we may not know exactly what. This kind of anticipation feels like an invitation to a sumptuous feast.

Sometimes when we anticipate, we prepare for bad things to happen. We make emergency plans and emergency funds, we make contingency plans. We buy life insurance and make wills. By anticipating, we can protect ourselves and our families.

Anticipation requires us to look into the future, for good or bad.

Anticipation — good and bad

American culture is built upon anticipation.

The foundling nation, in its Declaration of Independence, declared that its citizens had the right to the pursuit of happiness. Not happiness itself, but the pursuit of happiness with its implication that happiness will be at the end of pursuit.

The consumerist culture of America, likewise, is built upon this anticipation. Every commercial that sells a product or service hooks the buyer through anticipation. The scenario presented on the screen, the promised emotional experience becomes the commodity anticipated; the item purchased is merely the vehicle.

Christmas, likewise, is sold to Americans through everything from commercials to Hallmark movies. There must be family, of course; a big meal; a big tree with presents underneath; an admonition despite all the focus on accumulation that Christmas is in the heart.

The problem with anticipation is that it often builds into a fantasy against which reality can’t measure. The family get-together involves political divisiveness, or such lack of acceptance from parents that it’s made unbearable. The person tasked with making the big dinner grows resentful at the lack of appreciation and the pile of dishes. The presents don’t provide as much joy as expected. One’s heart isn’t feeling Christmas.

My Christmas doesn’t look like the one being sold on TV. My husband and I travel seven hours to visit my relatives, who do not greet us effusively. We have no children, and we leave our Christmas tree back home. We mingle with people celebrating Christmas and Hanukkah and many other holidays. The lodge we stay at is the only thing that looks like a Hallmark Christmas.

And I anticipate this escape every year, and it doesn’t disappoint me.

That feeling that something’s going to happen

The feeling like something is about to happen.

It feels like an itch between the shoulderblades, so deep that no amount of itching could get rid of it. Like a target is painted there and I can feel where the arrow is going to land, but it hasn’t landed yet.

Most of the time I feel like this, nothing happens.

If anything prompts this feeling, it’s the belief something should be happening and frustration that it’s not. I’ve just got off for break, I don’t go back in until the second or so week of January, and I don’t know what to do with myself.

I could work (I have a poster to do) but my brain is still tired from finishing up the semester and it’s Saturday.

I could rest, but that’s the sort of thing that brings up this feeling something should be happening.

I could write — I probably should write. That would likely get me out of the house, because I write better at the cafe. A short story awaits.

Waiting

The most mundane of waits: A woman sits in the grimy, poorly-lit waiting lounge of the car repair shop, which consists of two cracked leather and chrome chairs next to a haphazard pile of hunting magazines. She glances at the coffee pot whose contents have burned to the bottom of the carafe. Finding no interest in Field and Stream, she pulls out her smartphone and gazes at it, grimacing.

A peevish wait: The teen paces, checks her watch again, scowling. Fifteen minutes late. She plops on the couch, which protests with a squeak of springs. She pulls out her phone, checks her voice mail, her e-mail, her messages. Nothing. She plays Words with Friends for a few minutes, checking her voice mail, her e-mail, and her messages in breaks. Nothing. She checks her watch again and sighs, kicking her heels off. Half an hour late, no messages — she’d been stood up.

Lovers wait: She looked out the window of the train as they passed the projects, tall and bleak with tiny windows, scorch blossoming from some, boards blocking the view of others. Past the projects, graffiti bloomed on the smoky walls of brick factories, the quick iconic scrawls interspersed with vibrant murals, all furtively sketched in the night. Then Chinatown, with its bold, ornate gate and glimpse into the ordered chaos of the outdoor market. The train stopped and moved backward, readying itself to start the maneuver to back into the station. At the station, the woman’s lover waited, lean and energetic and foolish in love with her, edgy like the city itself. She smiled.

Waiting for the end: Her mother lay dying, hooked up to monitors, scratching her bruised hand repeatedly and murmuring that something bit her, that there were bugs all over her. Her father, exasperated, reassured her mother that there were no bugs. It was not the tiny cancer in her mother’s brain that was killing her — it was the pneumonia, and her body’s inability to hold onto sodium. It was never the cancer that killed; cancer only disrupted.

Friday: The week had been rough. So close to the end of the semester, students groused about everything, gathering around her like a flock of geese pecking at her, demanding this and that. And she greeted them, calmly answering their questions instead of lashing out at veiled insults. It was not their fault, she reasoned; they were very stressed from proving themselves and falling short, and it wasn’t unusual for students to have external locus of control toward their failures, blaming outside forces. Still, Friday couldn’t come soon enough, and she would relax with a glass of wine in a totally silent living room.

Anticipation: The pristine layer of snow, the glow of her heart, whispered that something, something good, was coming. She didn’t know if it was a little or big thing, if it would make her day or change her life. She wondered if an attack of bliss, of transcendental, edgy bliss, was about to descend on her as it had in the past. She hoped not — she hoped that this time it would be good without the price to pay.

A child’s wait: Tucked in bed, the little girl keeps one eye open, waiting for a change in the air, a trickle of magic that feels like tingles and kittens, that will tell her Santa has arrived. The eye closes, and she falls asleep next to her sister.