Don’t Be Too Excited
2 min
I was about to board a flight when I sent a message to our family group chat, just letting them know I was heading out.
A few moments later, Baba responded.
“Remember not to be too excited.”
I paused when I read it. Huh? I remember feeling slightly taken aback, almost amused. It wasn’t what I expected to hear in that moment.
I texted back, “What do you mean?”
He replied, “Accidents often happen when people are excited and not paying attention.”
I said, “Got it,” and boarded my flight.
At the time, it felt like a strange thing to say to someone who was about to begin something exciting. I understood it as something practical. A kind of safety tip you acknowledge and move on from.
But it stayed with me.
It stayed with me throughout that trip, and then on the ones that followed—a reminder in the background: it’s okay to feel excited, but to stay aware of that excitement.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about it differently.
Not just in the context of travel, but in the way excitement shows up whenever something feels new.
Because unfamiliarity isn’t limited to being in a different place. It can happen anywhere. You can feel it walking into a space you’ve never been, even if it’s down the street from where you live. You can feel it sitting across from someone for the first time, even in a city you know well. There’s something about not yet knowing—about being in the presence of something or someone you haven’t learned the shape of—that changes the way you move.
In those moments, everything feels slightly more alive. Your attention sharpens, and you lean in without thinking too much about it.
And it’s easy to trust that feeling.
To let that sense of aliveness stand in for something more—to assume it means something about what’s in front of you.
But I’m starting to understand what Baba meant.
Excitement doesn’t just open you. It can also absorb you. You move with the moment, and what you feel begins to take on meaning before there’s been time to really see what’s there.
What feels like clarity is sometimes just activation—your body responding to something new, and your mind quietly trying to decide what it means.
You see it in a lot of places. In new environments. In new conversations. Even in the early moments of meeting someone—how quickly a feeling can start to settle into an interpretation before anything has had the chance to unfold.
I don’t think that makes the feeling any less real—the sense of curiosity, of openness, of being pulled into the present—it’s what allows you to engage, to discover, to feel.
But I’m beginning to see that excitement isn’t the same as awareness.
It tells you that something has your attention. But it doesn’t necessarily tell you what something is, or what it will become once that initial energy softens.
Because there’s always a moment when it does.
Nothing dramatic. Just a quiet shift. The environment hasn’t changed, the person hasn’t changed, but something in you is no longer reaching in quite the same way.
And it’s easy, in that moment, to think something has been lost. But maybe what’s happening is something else. Maybe you’re just beginning to see more clearly.
I think about Baba’s message differently now. Not as a warning against excitement, but as a reminder to stay with yourself inside of it. To let the experience open you without letting it carry you away.
Because novelty has a way of opening things.
But it doesn’t tell you what to keep.
And sometimes, the difference between what feels good in the moment and what’s actually right only reveals itself once the feeling has passed.
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