It’s Friday, October 9th, and I’m scrolling through the endless portal of TikTok. A montage of nostalgic Christmas photos from the 2000s with “Somewhere in My Memory” by the acclaimed John Williams plays. The text overlaying the photos reads: “only 106 days until Christmas”. The comments are filled with excitement and anticipation. The only problem? They were doing the same thing when it was summer – making videos about fall, saying “xx days until Halloween”. In the summer, people romanticize fall. In the fall, people romanticize winter. In the winter, people romanticize spring/summer. When do we actually live out these romanticizations if we’re constantly anticipating the next season?
Don’t get me wrong – I love to look ahead to the next bright moment. Personally I’m not a fan of winter and am constantly dreading the gloomy bleak days, while waiting for spring to settle in. I’ve noticed though, that once those anticipated days come, I look back on the memories I created from those dreaded days. It’s like time slipped away and I forgot to witness it. It’s not just seasons we await. We’ve turned anticipation into a habit for every moment. A dinner reservation. A hangout with friends. A sports game. A vacation. The future of these times is a blank canvas. We can project our most ideal outcomes onto it – imagining the perfect joke that makes everyone laugh, imagining the most delicious meal, imagining making memories that will last a lifetime. The future hasn’t disappointed us yet because we haven’t experienced it. It remains full of possibilities. The present, conversely, is imperfect. A mundane after-school afternoon. The same routine commute home. Conversations you don’t want to have. A season that doesn’t meet your expectations. But what if those were the moments we were anticipating – and we failed to recognize their arrivals? You were bored in school, waiting to drive home. You couldn’t wait to go home and do nothing. And it’s fall, and you’re looking forward to Christmas – but in the summer you were looking forward to fall. All these moments have arrived but you keep anticipating the next best thing. Thus the cycle continues. We tell ourselves the next moment will be the best one, that what’s around the corner will be better than what’s here now. But if we’re constantly waiting for life to become more exciting, when do we actually give ourselves the chance to experience it?
Maybe the problem is that we not only anticipate an experience, but a feeling that the experience evokes. We want Christmas to feel like childhood. We want summer to feel endless. We want a hangout with friends to feel like a coming-of-age movie. So imagine the disappointment we feel when those anticipated moments don’t go how we wanted. Our solution is to anticipate the next one – the next Christmas, the next summer, the next hangout. We don’t have to sit with disappointment very long when there is another event to look forward to on the horizon. This issue is only further amplified by social media where everyone tries to make everything as perfect and aesthetically pleasing as possible. So no doubt we have high expectations for the future. A montage of a New York City Christmas with a perfect snowfall. A summer spent along the Amalfi Coast. A cozy, autumn afternoon after school spent at the library drinking coffee with leaves falling outside the window. All these moments are made to look cinematic – they’re edited, filtered, and paired with music that conveys to us exactly how these moments should feel. So before we’ve experienced them, we already have the highest expectations of how they should feel. And when they don’t feel like that, guess what we do? Anticipate the next! Anticipate anticipate anticipate. If you’re getting sick of reading that word, trust me, I’m getting sick of saying it. When we are constantly looking for the next best second of our lives, it naturally becomes default. We skip the present. And yet before we know it, the present that we’re living in is what becomes the past that we strive to relive in the future. Stay with me here.
When I was in middle school, I couldn’t wait for high school. I couldn’t wait to get my driver’s license. I couldn’t wait for prom. As much as I loved the expanded freedom I gained in high school, I missed middle school. The innocence. The purity of friendships. The less stressful classes. Even when I was in high school, I couldn’t wait for college. And now that I’m in college, I yearn for the memories I made in high school. I miss the communal relationships I had with students in my grade. I miss plotting the route I would take to class just so I could see a friend in the hallway. We spend our childhoods wanting to grow up, our teenage years craving independence, and our adulthoods wondering where all the time went. Now that I’m in college, I’ve gotten better with being more present. Though I am excited for my adulthood, I am savoring as much of my college experience as I can.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting more from life. Excitement and anticipation make life more eventful. But it becomes a problem when the moment we lived in, that we wanted to jump past, becomes the moment we memorialize. And we question what happened to it. That’s the irony of this conundrum. We will look back at the mundane afternoons, the habitual commutes, the evenings spent with friends, and the seasons we wished to skip ahead of. We might even find ourselves longing for the moments that we couldn’t wait to escape from. But how are we supposed to know which moments will become the ones we savor? It’s often unexpected – you didn’t think you’d miss the boring science class in high school or the long sports practices that made you question whether you want to keep playing or not. We can’t predict what day we’ll miss, what time we wish we could relive, which conversation we wish we could have again, etc. But that’s exactly why it matters to pay attention now and live in the present, before time gives these moments a stamp of significance we failed to recognize.
To address this problem doesn’t mean to put away all distractions and jump for joy at everything happening to you in this very instance. The goal isn’t to stop looking forward; it’s to stop looking so far ahead that we forget to look around. We can look forward to Christmas without wishing fall away. We can count down the days to a vacation without treating everyday leading up to it like a chore. We can make plans and dream about the future as long as we still allow ourselves to live in the present that we once wished so hard for.
So, maybe the next time I open TikTok and see another montage of nostalgic Christmas photos with “Somewhere in my Memory” accompanying it, I’ll let myself enjoy it. Maybe I’ll look forward to Christmas, just as I once looked forward to fall. I’ll also look forward to reminiscing on the moment I’m present in right now. There will always be something to look forward to. Time never stops, regardless of whether we spend it longing for the future or appreciating the present. Because eventually, the future we longed for will become the past we wish we could revisit.
Christmas is 63 days away. But October is here. And I don’t want to miss it.