The countdown was great, but the trip is now. Don’t keep anticipating a thing that already started.

Anticipation is genuinely enjoyable, and it has a bad habit of outliving its usefulness. You spend weeks looking forward to something, the looking forward becomes the mode you are in, and then the thing starts while part of you is still waiting for it to begin. The event comes out thinner because you never left the run-up.

Notice when the waiting is over. Say it plainly on the first morning: this is the thing now. Then stop checking whether it is living up to the version you built while you waited.