Costa Rica Bound!

I get asked a lot about the trip to Costa Rica that Chris and I are taking at the end of March. We were recipients of the “Gift of Happiness,” which is an eight-day stay in Costa Rica at beautiful hotels, doing adventurous activities, in exotic locations. Sounds pretty darn happy to me.

But whenever people would ask me about it, I sort of avoided the topic. There were two reasons. First, there was this tiiiiiiiny little problem with my passport. Like, the fact that I didn’t have one. Years ago, when I was in my teens, I had a passport, but who the heck knows where it is now. When I needed one for my honeymoon, it was during the time when you could still use a certified birth certificate to fly with, so that’s how I got out of the country then. But now, I needed a real passport and mine was no where to be found. I decided not to tell our lovely travel agent this minor detail in the planning (sorry, if you’re reading right now!!!). I figured I’d apply for a new passport, on the hunch that since I now needed an adult passport, it technically WAS the first time I was applying. But as the plans were formed for our trip and as plane tickets and hotel reservations arrived, I kept this horrible pit in my stomach. What if they sent the passport application back to me and said it would be a more complicated process since I had lost my first? I wouldn’t have time for that before our trip! I was up all night long some nights, worrying about my passport.

But then… IT CAME!!!!!!

I was so excited I could hardly speak! Now I was legal and ready to roll! But even with that huge weight off my chest, I still found it hard to get really excited. And, actually, I feel that way about a lot of things these days.

In the past few years, I’ve become a lot more hesitant about celebrating things too far into the future. We made a lot of plans for the past two years – a move across country, a new life for our family, great jobs, and an easy transition. And a lot of stuff disappointed me and, at time, downright hurt me, when I expected one thing and another thing happened instead. I guess that happens to you as you get older. In fact, it probably happens to people a lot younger than me, but I just hadn’t experienced it yet. For the most part, whatever I wanted to happen in my life, had happened. I’d worked really hard to accomplish goals and follow my plans, and so I just got used to things always working out for me. So, when I went through those few years where everything sucked, it was a really big wake up call for me that sometimes in life, things just don’t go like you want them to. I’m glad I learned that lesson, but learning it did cause me to shy away a bit from celebrating things a bit too early.

The downside to that hard life lesson is that you can sometimes lose your optimism. I remember when we finally found our house and were under contract to buy, everyone around me was so excited and wanted me to be excited, too. But I had just come off the heels of a two year period where everything seemed to fall apart at the last minute, and I wasn’t too eager to get all excited. I basically waited for the other shoe to drop through the whole buying process. And that’s pretty normal, I guess. Buying a house is tense and stressful. But even after we got into the house, I never really had a big celebration moment. It was always just a “I’m going to get by until something bad happens,” kind of feeling. I think that’s why I’ve been so slow on the renovations to our house. I haven’t really sat around dreaming of paint samples and fabric swatches or anything. And I think that’s all because I’ve lost a bit of my excitement about major events in life because I got burned so bad during that two year period of time.

I worried for a while that it was depression that kept me from being excited about things. Whenever something major would happen and I wouldn’t be as excited as I used to get, I’d secretly stop and wonder if life was always going to be this way. Would I always expect bad things to happen now? Would I ever be completely, totally happy again? And if I wasn’t, would it be because I’d grown wiser with age, or would it be because I had pieces of depression still in my mind, planted like tiny emotional landmines that always went off whenever happy things happened to me? But I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, and I don’t think it is remnants of depression. I think that as we get older, we learn the hard lesson that life sometimes doesn’t go as planned. The upside to all of that is that I’m also learning that it’s often in the unplanned situations that you find real happiness. Deeper happiness.

And so, I think it’s strangely (and divinely, I must say) ironic that Chris and I are getting ready for our “Gift of Happiness” trip. Because if I’ve learned anything about happiness, it’s that it really is a gift that is given out of experiences and moments created by us, for us, and with us by the people we really love in our lives.

We leave in three weeks, and for the first time since we heard we were going, I got excited this morning. Really, truly excited. Giddy even. I was riding in my car on the way to work and a song came on the radio. It was about a couple packing their bags and getting away from it all for a while. And I thought about sitting on the beach with Chris, laughing with him, spending entire days with him without having to share our attention between kids or dogs or jobs or family.  An entire week of having plans, but also of having the luxury of knowing that the absolute worst that could happen is our plans would fall through and we’d end up sitting on a beach all day.  And I thought to myself, “You know, who couldn’t use a little gift of happiness every now and then?”