Our family enjoys taking multigenerational trips. The ingredients for a successful family trip are an exciting location, a fairly structured schedule, and lots of planning. We might plan more than a year in advance depending on the location, at the very least we need to get started several months prior to our intended departure. The planning is fun, like a puzzle. You start with the known parts of the trip: the arrival and departure dates, the size of the group, the budget. From there you begin to fill in the flow of the days: tours, meals, excursions. Planning a trip starts with almost unlimited possibility; it is a dreamy time when you are imagining all that you could do and want to do. The excitement and anticipation of the trip begins to build.
Many years ago, I saw my first therapist. Jo Ann, the therapist, talked a lot more than I expected. I never wanted to go to therapy before, in part because my mom came from the generation of self-help books with loads of therapy, self-reflection, and much more mixed together. Growing up the book shelves were laden with Freud, Jung, Dyer, not the history books or literary fiction I found at my grandparents who seemed much more sane to me.
Jo Ann explained to me that every feeling was like a coin, each side representing a slightly different expression of the emotion. Being anxious is easily the other side of the coin to feeling excited. Anticipation, like what I feel when I am planning a trip, is akin to excitement. There is a positive charge to it.
What would be the other side of the coin to anticipation or anxiety? Future tripping? I define future tripping as that thing that happens when I start to get ahead of myself. I am thinking about an upcoming event, like a meeting then I start imagining all sorts of outcomes. Most of these imagined outcomes are based in fear. This is what I am afraid of happening, and I am getting ahead of myself. Unlike the positive charge I get out of planning a trip, I am future tripping.
Making plans and setting goals give me the structure I like and need to nudge me along in life. When I begin a puzzle, I start with putting together the outside edges then I might sort pieces based on some graphic similarity. In the most simple of terms, my life is organized the same way. I think about Jo Ann and her wisdom often; she taught me to examine both sides of the coin. For me, this practice helps to ground me in the present.
