Tuesday was a big day for me. Tuesday was the day I had my appointment at the Brazilian consulate to get my tourist visa. A lot was riding on that day. In order to even get a tourist visa to Brazil, you have to have already booked your flights and bring in a printed copy of your itinerary showing travel into and out of the country (among other requirements). So, if I didn’t get my visa for some reason, I’d be looking at a substantial monetary loss. On top of that, it had taken me two and half weeks to even get that appointment, and I was moving tomorrow. If I had problems at the visa office, I wasn’t going to get a second chance – Brazil was off.*
Getting my visa was a big deal, and I was very excited when I woke up that morning. I noticed that excitement, but then immediately noticed something else accompanying that excitement – anxiety. I had never noticed anxiety in my excitement before, but it was viscerally evident to me that morning. A number of realizations hit me in quick succession:
- Yuck, I don’t like this feeling. It’s harshing my calm.
- Wow, my excitement has always been accompanied by anxiety. Always.
- I don’t want to feel excited ever again.
Excitement is one of those feelings we tend of think of as positive. It’s good to be excited about something. It makes you feel alive. It means you have passion about the object of your excitement. A general lack of excitement tends to be viewed as negative, having given up on life, having no ambition, being numb. I’ve certainly taken that view of excitement, and I’ve wanted to be excited. I liked being excited because it made me feel alive…
But it also made me feel anxious. The problem with excitement is that it’s provoked exclusively by something that we consider to be external to ourselves and it’s concerned with expectation about something that’s going to happen to us in the future. There’s an element of happiness in excitement, but it’s dependent up on something outside of us happening according to our expectations. That means that whether we will be happy or not is entirely dependent on things outside our control. That’s where the anxiety comes in.
Excitement is essentially expectation of good things happening combined with a fear that they won’t. That’s what I realized on Tuesday morning. And that’s when my attachment to excitement started to fall away. I no longer wish to be excited, and I no longer view excitement as a positive thing. I’m not saying I’ll never be excited again. In fact, I’m quite certain I will. But I don’t wish to be excited – I prefer the peacefulness and calm of internal quietude. And having realized this, and having let go of my attachment to being excited (if only temporarily) makes me…well…it makes me a little excited, if I’m being totally honest.
Have you ever noticed that your excitement contained an undercurrent of anxiety? Have you ever found yourself trying neurotically to control events to unfold according to your expectations?
*The Brazilian Consulate requires 5 days to process visa requests – I won’t know for sure whether my visa request was approved until this Tuesday. My cousin has been kind enough to retrieve my passport from the Brazilian Consulate for me and mail my passport to me up here in Santa Rosa. Talk about an exercise in letting go!
TL;DR: Excited to see my attachment to excitement start to fall away.
How exciting!