Excitement is an exciting thing, isn’t it?

It bubbles up and overflows and gets us all jittery to the point that we just want to yell “I CANNOT WAIT FOR….” (fill in the blank).

During my wife and I’s pre-marriage classes, however, our priest made an interesting point that changed my perspective on this phrase.

Understandably, after most people are engaged, they’re pretty jacked about it and cannot wait for their wedding day. That’s how I was. And that’s how my wife was. But our priest wanted us to consider it from a different angle.

Instead, he challenged us to say that we were “so excited” for our wedding day.

He told us when we “cannot wait” for something to happen, we’re verbally wishing the time away between now and then. We essentially want it to never happen and just skip straight to that one event that’s lingering out in the future.

But when we do that, we miss all of the things we’re supposed to experience between now and then. We end up living our lives jumping from one big thing to the next, constantly rushing passed everything in the middle. Like only eating the cookies on a Nestle Toll House cookie sandwich and skipping the ice cream (who does that?!)

While it wasn’t a monumental shift in verbiage, it ended up changing the tone and expectation of what we were working toward. In the context of our engagement, we still had some learning to do and important conversations to work through to be on the same page about how our marriage would work. If we had gone straight from my bended-knee proposal to the alter, it might have been a much different transition into married life.

The same thing applies to other areas of our life. Maybe you’re taking a new role at work, and you cannot wait to start in the new position. But if the re-org doesn’t happen for three more weeks and you mentally check out of your current job, some important task or life lesson may well pass you by. And then you’ve missed out.

Being excited for things isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s exciting! But expressing that excitement in the right way and keeping it in perspective can make the experience even more fulfilling when we (finally) get there.