With just under a week to go I am always amazed at how fast Christmas comes round each year. It’s been super fast this time, speedy broadband fast and we seem to be following suit by doing things much faster too. Christmas presents are bought and wrapped months in advance, children make out their lists in the summer, turkeys are ordered before they’ve been born and we’re all sort of living in the future. So when Christmas Day finally arrives all the expectation and anticipation comes to an abrupt end because the future we’ve been waiting for is right here, it’s present. All our hopes, worries and wishes for this time of year will soon come to a head and I’m guessing there’s lots of wishing going on right now.
Wishing is the essence of living in the future. Our wishes are always one step ahead of us, they are future bound and dwell in the realm of possibility, after all anything’s possible right? Can you imagine what life would be like without possibility? It’s impossible to imagine because we continually live in that space, always planning and preparing, expecting and supposing. We are authors of our own future, writing and rewriting the chapters as we go along. So I’m wondering then what happens when our wish comes true; when the possibility becomes a reality.
“There are two tragedies in life.
One is not to get your heart’s desire.
The other is to get it”. (1)
Not to sound like a spoilsport (so close to Christmas) but I’m inclined to think that a wish which comes true loses its magic and it happens precisely at the point when it stops being a wish, the point when we've got what we wished for. Although our wish may have come true at the same time we lose our reason for wishing. The wish disappears and perhaps with it a sense of meaning too that it inherently held. While a wish remains a wish it serves an important function; keeping the dream alive so to speak. And we invest so much of ourselves in our wishes, they are not only what we want but who we are, so much so that when our wish comes true we lose a small part of ourselves in getting what we want. I must just say here though I’m not quite sure this theory really applies to kids as they genuinely seem overjoyed when their wishes come true! For them the magic is the present in both senses of the word. Their anticipation of the run up towards Christmas or a birthday reaches a crescendo of absolute joy when the event they’ve been wishing for finally arrives. Going back to us complicated grownups however it seems the greater the anticipation of something the bigger the anti-climax afterwards. Perhaps our happiness is the wish itself. Perhaps we derive our fun from the anticipation of something.
There’s no doubt how powerful anticipation can be. It creates responses to things that haven’t even happened yet, it’s like time travel for feelings. So quite often our anticipation of something is mismatched to what actually then happens and at times it can be a relief i.e. visit to the dentist being relatively painless, and then there are other times when it is a huge disappointment. The latter is the sticky point of wishing and the downside of having too much anticipation. It’s that old familiar experience where you’re really looking forward to an event thinking that it’s going to be brilliant and you’re going to have a fantastic time only to find that you don’t and you neither feel anywhere close to how you thought you would. It’s difficult to understand what’s gone wrong in those situations especially when everything was in its place to be great. And by the same mysterious token how often do we go into things with very little expectation or even enthusiasm and then find ourselves having the best time we could possibly have had.
I suppose you can’t always plan happiness it happens in between the plans and best of all when there are no plans. In a sense that’s what wishes are, unfulfilled plans and whether they come true or not is slightly beside the point. Looking out my window I see that my Christmas wish has already come true but it's okay I can live with that, though had better go now and plough the anti-climax off my drive.
References
(1) George Bernard Shaw (1903) Man and Superman.
References
(1) George Bernard Shaw (1903) Man and Superman.
Posts
