The Sweetness of Waiting: Why Anticipation Is Its Own Kind of Joy

I booked my flight to Carcassonne a few days ago, and already I catch myself pausing mid-day to think about it — the light on the ramparts at dusk, the walk from my apartment on Rue de la République down toward Place Carnot, the particular quiet of a French morning before the shops open. Yet the trip hasn't started. Not really. Or has it?

Psychologists have a name for what I'm describing: anticipatory joy. Studies on happiness consistently find that the excitement we feel before a trip often rivals — sometimes exceeds — the pleasure we feel during it. We plan the days. We imagine the meals. We picture ourselves rounding a corner in the medieval city and seeing the stones catch the afternoon sun. None of it has happened yet, and all of it is already real, because we are living inside the story we're telling ourselves about our own future.

There is something almost defiant about this. Life has a way of narrowing our sense of agency — deadlines arrive, obligations pile up, the days blur into routine. But anticipation reminds us of a simple, radical fact: we get to choose where we go and what we build. Buying that apartment in Carcassonne wasn't an accident. It was a decision, made with intention, that is now quietly reshaping the shape of my year. Every time I think about October, I am reminded that I am not simply reacting to my life. I am authoring it.

This is what I mean when I say we are the architects of our own lives. An architect doesn't just react to the site she's given; she imagines what could stand there and then does the work to bring it into being. The trip I'm anticipating is the product of choices — some large, some small — that Tammy and I made together, and now those choices are paying interest, in the form of daydreams about cassoulet and cathedral bells and the particular gold of southern French light.

There's a lesson in this for the rest of life too, I think. Anticipation is a kind of practice. It asks us to imagine a future worth wanting and then to trust that we had a hand in building it. That trust doesn't come from nowhere — it comes from having made the decision, done the planning, taken the leap. The joy of looking forward to Carcassonne isn't separate from the work of getting there. It's the reward for it.

So here I am, still weeks out, already halfway there in my mind. And I've come to think that's not wasted time or wishful thinking. It's part of the trip. It's proof that we shape our lives more than we sometimes give ourselves credit for — one decision, one plane ticket, one small act of architecture at a time.

Six weeks and counting.