The Gift of Anticipation

I have recently been planning a holiday. It will be my first visit to Vietnam so I'm quite excited. It's been a long while since I've travelled to a city or country that I've not previously been to, to a country where I don't speak the language and is not all that developed. My previous trips over the last few years have generally been to places I've been to before and where I know people so the excuse for travelling has been to renew kith and kin ties. My shorter trips have been to nearby seaside resorts and the familiarity was comforting since those trips are really just to chill out rather than be adventurous.

So for the first time in years, I'm actively anticipating a trip fraught with discovery of new sights and tastes and people. A planner by nature, I enjoy having something to look forward to, a precise date and time I leave and a good sense of what I want to do there. I'm past the age where I research things to death before I go, but it's still nice to have a rough idea of what the Temple of Literature is like and why it's worth visiting or that Halong Bay is worth the side trip as it's a UNESCO heritage sight . I've even "planned" to have days where my travelling companion and I can just hang loose and wander around the older parts of the city, replete with history and culture.

I truly enjoy this sense, of preparation, of working towards a clear goal, and of feeling it draw a little bit closer each day. Not of course that it was particularly difficult to organise since the only real questions that confronted us were whether to travel on a budget airline or a better airline. Or whether to spend one night on a junk or two. But as I approach my holiday in a similar way to how I approach most of my life, my work, my relationships, I find for me, this advent period to be just as important as the event itself.

So here's to the gift of anticipation: may it help us to remember that it is the journey that matters just as much as the end itself.