Anticipation
I read something (that I now can't find) a while back on happiness. The article said that people's happiness is not so much tied in to the actual happy event, but to the anticipation of happiness, and the memory of happiness. We get much more pleasure out of the peripheral experience than out of the (usually brief) event itself.
Dutch is milking every drop of joy out of her candy necklace. She's had it in her possession for several days, and is fully aware that she doesn't get to eat it until tomorrow, but she likes to take it out of its little box and study it, and yesterday I found her blissfully sniffing it. She talks about it a lot, too, and about how fantastically, unfathomably, deliriously wonderful it's going to be to actually get to eat it.
As the person who ordained that she couldn't eat it until tomorrow (mostly because I wanted to contain The Stickiness), and then waited only until after her bedtime the day the packages came to eat a pile of candy myself, I feel that I should probably be practicing what I preach. I would probably be happier.
Dutch is milking every drop of joy out of her candy necklace. She's had it in her possession for several days, and is fully aware that she doesn't get to eat it until tomorrow, but she likes to take it out of its little box and study it, and yesterday I found her blissfully sniffing it. She talks about it a lot, too, and about how fantastically, unfathomably, deliriously wonderful it's going to be to actually get to eat it.
As the person who ordained that she couldn't eat it until tomorrow (mostly because I wanted to contain The Stickiness), and then waited only until after her bedtime the day the packages came to eat a pile of candy myself, I feel that I should probably be practicing what I preach. I would probably be happier.
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