“What does excitement feel like in you?” “What does excitement look like for you?” Those were two questions posed to me last week, by two different people in very different contexts. I could not answer either of them.
What is excitement? When did I lose the ability to feel excited?
I started thinking about occasions where I felt excitement as opposed to nervousness. I had to search a long way back in my life to come up with anything that resembled joyful excitement.
How did I lose the ability to express or even notice that emotion? Or have I worked so hard to suppress it that I can’t get it back. I suppose in my youth I felt excitement before a date, and sometimes felt it early in a relationship. Those days are long gone. I can’t recall being excited about Christmas, and birthdays were just another day in the calendar.
I know I am looking forward to seeing this little Angel next month…it has been almost a year since I have been able to watch her get very excited over so many little discoveries such watering cans, sticks, roses, blueberries, alphabet blocks and music. And then the excitement can turn immediately to screams and tantrums.
Perhaps I can assume that my extreme positive emotions have been balanced out by the extreme negative, and I’m floating somewhere in the middle.
Reflections 
Perhaps one of the best ways to reconnect with our younger self, is to be totally immersed in the present moment and to allow our adult self to be spontaneous is to spend time with a child and allow them be our teacher. What I discovered in myself is that I often felt excitement and kept it the expression of it under a tight lid. ‘Letting go’ and ‘letting it be’ helped me pop the lid open. It remains a conscious work in progress this allowing and letting go but I get ‘excited’ about it.
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