Conversations For Transformation: Essays Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

Conversations For Transformation

Essays By Laurence Platt

Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

And More

Anticipation:

Accounting For An American Love Affair

Vallejo, California, USA

Fourth of July, 2005


This essay, Anticipation: Accounting For An American Love Affair, is the prequel to the first trilogy Visits With A Friend:
  1. Second First Impression
  2. Do Artists Retire?
  3. Presence Of Love
in that order.

It is the companion piece to It is also the first in an open group Visits With A Friend Prequels:
  1. Anticipation: Accounting For An American Love Affair
  2. Eye Of The Needle
  3. Secret Service
  4. Everyone Loves You
  5. Close Up, Face To Face, Larger Than Life, And Twice As Natural
  6. View From A Fallow Wheatfield
  7. Flying
  8. Three Stairs At A Time
  9. Something Fierce, Something Wonderful
  10. Serving High
  11. Simple But Not Easy
  12. A Request Asked Harder
in that order.

It is also the first in a group of sixteen written on the Fourth Of July:
  1. Anticipation: Accounting For An American Love Affair
  2. Independence Day
  3. I'd Rather Be With Me
  4. Do It For Nothing
  5. The Only Way Out Is Through
  6. Under All Circumstances
  7. Word Power
  8. When There's Nothing To Say
  9. The Possibility Of Being Independent And Free
  10. Intimacy In A Crowded Place
  11. What Goes On Internally
  12. Imprints Of Love
  13. Bookends: A Reflection On Mortality
  14. Come Back To Being
  15. Nobody Is Responsible Except You
  16. Like A Monk In A Cave
in that order.

It is also the prequel to Plastic Chandelier II.


1954
Flag by Jasper Johns
Like planets orbiting around stars and stars around the centers of the galaxies, each time with you completes and then there is tomorrow and the possibility of the next time with you. You are the now worth being and the future worth living into. You are a future of plain being (just because that's possible) or of doing (which is never enough anyway). Being with you is always enough. And when it's over there's still enough. The promise of being with you again is Life, love, reward, validation, acknowledgement, and the challenge to be. Looking forward, anticipation is de rigueur.

My once panicked reluctant thoughts and actions get focused and committed and calm down. The present becomes distinguished not just as now but as now preceding you. Looking forward to the next time I can't settle for a mediocre now. I am alive in now driven by the promise of what's next. I become naturally inquisitive. Indeed my very nature is inquisitiveness. I do not simply inquire when I am with you. I become inquiry. That's what's called for when I'm in love. Anticipation calls forth the richer, preferred perspective.

What is anticipation of a great future without creating a great now first? After all, what will I bring to you later if not my created now? The promise of the future with you recalibrates my commitment to the present - my present, with or without you. That's the most amazing aspect of this: you are the gift, whether you are physically present with me here, or not.

In the game we play called Life, what now is not we deem more important than what now is. That's the carrot we dangle in front of ourselves from a stick, all the while pretending we aren't doing that. With you, now is always complete. In the now with you I am complete and I am complete that you are complete. And in spite of myself I anticipate being complete in a future forgetting I'm complete now or pretending I'm not complete now. In love with you I remember or I stop pretending or both.

Anticipation of you fills me pouring from me whether I am asleep or whether I am awake, whether my doing is directed at you or whether it is directed at anyone else or anything else. In anticipation I am willing to surrender what I am for what I could be. In anticipation I am complete with my past, my present, and my future. Anticipation and completion and fullness ... simply because I am alive.

With you I am braver, wiser, fuller, sweeter, softer, calmer, richer, serener. I look in the mirror of you and I see you and I see me and I see all six billion of us. There is no separation. We are one seamless continuum. The bliss of knowing that melts me. I am touched moved and inspired by you standing for that portal. I stand with you.

This anticipation this once more oh my darling once more just once more again again oh again please again ... this anticipation ... this anticipation ... this anticipation ...


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