ANTICIPATION
I'm so doggone lazy these days. Or maybe lazy isn't quite the correct appellation. Maybe the correct one would be “easily diverged”. Or perhaps “easily sidetracked”. I say this in apology for not writing in this blog for a million years or so it seems. Oh, I always have good intentions to do so. I always intend to sit down and click out a masterful edition of the blog. I've thought about it countless times. And I have absolutely wonderful ideas for subject matter, too. I'll sit and imagine how I'll word this and how I'll phrase that. I'll have the first page or two almost written in my head when I stop and maybe take a quick look at Facebook or check my email. Or maybe someone will say something to me to interrupt my reverie. Something seems to always be there that is interesting or requires my attention and... away I go doing something other than blogging. And all the good ideas and great intentions vanish in the haze.
It's amazing how many great blogs you've missed!
So let's make a start on this one and see where the road takes us. To greatness or to mediocrity. Or to just a blog kind of blog.
I've spent a lot of time recently daydreaming about an upcoming event that is situated a long, long time in the future. So far in the future, if truth be told, that making too many plans now would be silly. It's much too far down the road. And I suppose one of my many failings is to jump the gun on things like this, to over-analyze and to examine a task from way too many different aspects. To visualize, to anticipate, to drive myself crazy trying to dot all the i's and to cross all the t's long, long before any of that is necessary.
To get specific, my wife and I have put a down payment on a cruise. We did it a week or two ago along with a friend from work and her husband. We're heading out on the Carnival Glory to, as Carnival likes to describe it, the exotic Eastern Caribbean. All that's entirely well and good and we're all delighted that we've made the commitment and are really, really happy that we're going to do it. The only drawback is that it's 400 days in the future, give or take a few. FOUR HUNDRED DAYS! That's a doggone long time! The act of booking this far in advance was smart for several reasons. First of which is you get a better rate on your cruise by booking far, far in advance. Second is that you get a much better choice of cabin. Later on your choices might be much more limited. So that's all to the good. But... It's 400 days away! FOUR HUNDRED DAYS! You can't even start looking at airline flights from home to the cruise port for another few months as they, unlike the cruise lines, don't book that far into the future.
So, for the aforementioned 400 days I have to sit and try to relax. Try to not get too excited about going on another cruise even though I am. Try to shift into quiet waiting mode to get through the next half-dozen months or so until I can again ratchet up into active planning mode.
But in the meantime I find myself watching videos on YouTube of cruisers on “our” boat cruising from “our” departure port to “our” destinations. Watching the happy faces and the blue waters and the welcoming palm trees.
And that thought brings me to another aspect of the upcoming cruise.
The anticipation.
With a lot of people, the anticipation of a looked-forward-to event is torture of a particularly evil kind. The hours drag, the days seem to take forever to pass and time seems to stand still. Or even start to go backward!
But I belong to a contrarian school of thought. I like to savor the anticipation, to luxuriate in the time between initiating the wait for an event and the event itself.
Let's face the cold reality, a one-week cruise is going to go by in a flash. In a veritable instant of time. We will no more than board the cruise ship and it will be time to pack up and leave it. One week – zip – cruise over and done. Just about that fast. Trust me, it will seem that way.
But the time between now and then? My friend, you can take that cruise a dozen time in your imagination – a hundred times. You can lovingly examine each facet of the upcoming cruise in detail, each leg, each port, each sea-day. You can feel the softness of the cabin's bed, savor the succulent taste of new foods, visualize the incredible blueness of the sea as your great white ship sails through it. You can marvel in the exotic beauty of a Caribbean island coming into view over the bow of your magic carpet – your cruise ship. You can hear the musical patois of the islanders talking in the markets and the sightseeing venues of the various ports-of-call and feel your feet start to move in rhythm to the Calypso music floating in the air. You can even feel the velvety caress of the ocean water as you glide over the surface and watch the beautiful fish swimming below you as you snorkel above them in the warm sea.
All of these wonderful things are available to you anytime! Just close your eyes and... you're there!
So I look at videos of the Carnival Glory gliding into an exotic port, close my eyes and I'm there, standing on the deck and watching the green of the approaching island rise above the crystal blue sea. I watch another video of a port we will visit, close my eyes and I'm there also, walking the old cobblestone streets, eating the fresh seafood, feeling the warm tropical breezes cool my sun-reddened skin and watching the white puffball clouds sail over the island in the azure sky.
So when the cruise date actually does arrive, I'll be an old salt! I'll have walked all the ship's corridors many times already, disembarked onto Caribbean islands countless times, made wonderful friends of shipmates and islanders and watched dozens of crimson sunsets over calm aquamarine seas.
Four hundred days to go? Over a year? A piece of cake! And if you're a Carnival sailor, you'll know... it's a piece of chocolate melting cake!
