Desire

 

“Human desire is incredible: Our self mobilizes itself by allowing itself to want. What we want eventually involves becoming more than we are. Rather than being driven by discomforts and deprivations, our sense of ‘unfulfilled destiny’ drives us forward.” — Dr. David Schnarch

I live in California. Here, the Buddhist perspective on desire, which is, that it leads to attachment and thereon to suffering, is rampant. So, I’ve had an ambivalent relationship with desire for quite a long time. When, in order to overcome being depressed, I figured out that I needed to know what I desired, and act on those desires, I began to understand that there was one kind of suffering which was actually good for me. Desire killed me, with pain, longing, and a sense of emptiness, but it also delivered me to who I am today. It turns out, it took a lot of strength to maintain my desire, so that I could have a chance of being the person I wanted to be.

I grew up being told not to want too much. I think my parents were trying to protect me. They succeeded for a time. I never wanted more than I could achieve. Little by little, I suffered less, and became very depressed. I didn’t have great disappointments, and I didn’t have the kind of passionate life I was capable of. I was alive, I knew how to survive, but I didn’t know how to thrive, how to create a life worth living.

I knew this before the stroke, had even dealt with it some, was partially out of being depressed, but I still wasn’t myself, wasn’t living a life built on my desire. Being close to death for a long time, having a life that included real physical limitations, forced me to decide if I desired life enough to go through what I must go through. That is why I call myself Lucky. Life forced me to choose, forced me to recognize, and live out my desire. Surrender doesn’t mean anything, if you don’t really have a choice, and I had a choice, I chose life, for the sheer awe of being around to witness the beauty and poignancy that attends our existence. Luckily, Life also chose me. I got a second chance.

It has been during that second chance that I really have come to understand how much my desire plays a role in making this life something that uniquely reflects me. Wanting has taken me over the edge. It has made me become something I wasn’t, but always wanted to be. I am more than I would have ever been, if I hadn’t found the strength within, to want what I couldn’t possibly be. I didn’t want to want, I didn’t want to hurt over where I was not what I wanted to be, but that very hurting sharpened my attention and motivated me. I became what I wanted to be, I grew, because the me I wanted to be, was latent in my being, evident only in my desire.

It is fair to say that only my desire, the power of my wanting, could have helped me persevere, helped me find the strength, to come out Lucky. I owe my present being to desire, to the mysterious integration of my will to become through hardship and the Universe’s desire for something that was simultaneously lifted up and humbled by another chance.

Desire is complicated. I think it is off-base, if it is for something outside of the self. If it is inside, then I think desire is soul longing. It is the urge toward wholeness. It is being pregnant with your self. I think we dare not ignore, or belittle, the power of such desire. Toward that end I ask you, just like I ask myself, what do you want, for your self? It is hard for me to hold myself to the task of finding my own true answer. It turns out that it is harder to live without an answer, to live by someone else’s desire, no matter how good.

I hope you find what you desire (as I hope I do), and I’m sure you (we) will, if you (we) dare want to enough to suffer, to mobilize our strength, our selves, and go beyond our selves, so that we can become our truer selves.

l/d

Silence

Silence. I fear it and look forward to it, often, for the same reason. I hear something speak to me, in the silence.  I don’t know who addresses me, but I know that if I’m truly silent, truth will come forth, not always in words, sometimes in images, dreams, or sensations, feelings that transport me, that install me in a reality like, but profoundly different, from this one. Silence can be pregnant, full like an electricity storm about to break, or empty. I have been stripped down by the silence, and lifted up. I have come to respect silence, to rely on it, and to be guided by it. Yet, even in this inquiry, a paean to the power of silence, I must admit, that true silence contains something that isn’t just the absence of noise.

Silence. It is enigmatic, opening me to the moment, or denying me any kind of certainty, stretching me until I fall into the limitless darkness. I lost silence for awhile, when I lived in the suburbs, and was surrounded by the man-made sounds of a crowded life, then was reduced to tears, when on a hike, I stumbled into the silence of a distant vale. I missed being unhinged by the unfathomable. I was somehow enlivened by silence.

Silence. It is winter, the time of “Silent Night,” a moment when it is supposed to be  quiet. Instead the holiday frenzy is everywhere, friends and family gather noisily together. I once complained to a spouse who made each Christmas an event of light, green bows, song, and holiday hoopla, that I wanted this time of year to be quiet and a spiritual retreat. Watch out what you wish for! The silence seems to be laughing, I don’t know if it is at me, or with me.  I am here in the silence, experiencing Christmas, not so much alone, but in some kind of solitude. I have come, this season, this moment, to be in the silence.

Silence. It beguiles and overwhelms me. I want these silent moments, when the condition of my shy soul becomes somewhat more evident, the terrifying times when I am as likely to find that I’ve been dishonest with myself, and others, and created a heart-wrenching mess, then to find real peace, trust in my being. I need the silence to be honest with myself, to know anything. I’m scared of the silence because it is so truthful. It calms me just long enough to provide me with a glimpse of what is real. It has taken me a long time to develop a tolerance for what silence can do for me. I come into the presence of silence, humbly aware that I am passing through, awkwardly at that, and only the silence persists.

I am also taken with interpersonal silences. I never know what is going on. I feel things happening when nothing is happening. I love shared silences, dwelling with another in the unknown. The moment might just be shared social awkwardness, or it might be the presence of something so huge and speechless that I will be bound forever to this being because we both felt something stupendous pass us by. The latter happens much more rarely than the former, but each time an interpersonal silence occurs, I am reminded that some mystery frequents the space between us. When silence with another comes, I am less lonely in this vast Universe.

Silence has bound me to groups of people. I have felt many forms of it. There has been the impatient and anxious silence that proceeds getting started, the cold and distant silence of boundaries crossed, awkwardly, sometimes heedlessly, and the profound silence that accompanies a shared discovery of our mutual vulnerability/strength. These episodes never fail to remind me how uncertain is our lot and how basically heroic most of us are.  I can go on, I gain access to some utterly human stockpile of strength, of desire, and I am able to face the next challenge, because of shared silences.

I’d like to be as silent inside as I sometimes am outside. The silence has helped me find a measure of internal quietude, a small amount of confidence, just enough to face the uncertainties of the day. In this season silence is extolled, remembered for the generative thing it is. But to me, silence is a year-round phenonema that reminds me how small I am, and how much the Universe wants me.

I would guess you are wanted too! Quietly though.

l/d

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I have also created a blog for the elder’s salon, which has some good pieces in it (including mine). See it at elderssalon.blogspot.com

I have also added a link. I don’t usually recommend websites but I have long felt that we (society) needed a vision of a future worth having and this short film points in that direction, Check it out http://www.ted.com/talks/nic_marks_the_happy_planet_index.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2010-08-31&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email

Happiness

I learned about something recently that has given me so much delight, and so much challenge, that I just had to share the prospect of it with you. As you may recall I’ve been blessed this year to be part of an elder’s group, awareness of the viability of real happiness first came to me there. I feel such gratitude toward those who I am traveling with right now, because they (the elders) helped me to see something I had long ago forgotten could exist for me.  Here is how it happened, and what it has constellated for me.

One evening, during a meeting of the elder’s circle, as we were going around saying our names, and describing something we liked about becoming older, I was struck by the impression that I was surrounded by a lot of people who had become themselves. This impression intrigued me. Later, we broke into small groups, where the impression grew into a full-blown, mind-altering, realization. Growing older had meant, for some of us, that we had arrived, despite still having further to go, at a time and place in our lives, where there were no roles, rules, or expectations, other than our own. We were free, and many of us had become idiosyncratically and uniquely our selves.

A rush of happiness came cascading in. I was surrounded by people who had become them selves. I was one of them; free to be authentic, different, uncertain, sensitive, foolish, erotic, crazy, and just plain me. At that moment I liked what getting old had done for me. Of course, I learned later that much of what distinguishes an elder from a merely old person had to do with how one responded to the hardships and losses of a long life. Freedom, and true elderhood, seemed to rest on choices that people made at the most difficult times in their lives. And miraculously, it seemed as if the best choices, the most effective decisions, had all been toward becoming truer to one’s self. In the midst of this group of self-possessed elders I discovered that happiness, my happiness, lay with cleaving to my own being.

That wasn’t all the joy I was to discover that night. I was delighted and surprised by what came next. I hadn’t even gotten used to the idea that my life-long struggle, to be me, had actually resulted in my becoming someone, myself, when it became clear that just being myself made a difference. One of the remarkable things that distinguished this group of people is that they want to give something back. There has been much talk in this group, perhaps spurred on by radicalism, of an elder insurgency.  The urge to provide some kind of alternative, met with the realization that becoming our selves was a radical, even subversive, thing, and an unbelievable joyous surprise was born. Merely being true to one’s self changed the world!

During that meeting, without ever intending it, I was brought to the realization that happiness existed, and could be a regular feature of my life. All I had to do, to be generally happy, was be my self. If I merely held onto my self in my relationships, if I stayed true to what emerged in me, as me, then I would be free. Happiness and freedom became synonymous.

In the weeks that have followed that realization, I have been reflecting upon happiness, and the limited role I have let it play in my life. I have discovered that I keep myself from being as happy as I could be, by letting my anxiety take me out of the moment. I have always been good at anticipating things, I liked to think I had the skill of a chess champion, looking ahead several moves. Instead, what I have realized, is best captured in the words of a friend of mine, who once wrote in a letter, that “anticipatory anxiety” was “the constipation” that “kept all the good shit from happening;” how true, and how unfortunate, for me.

With the experience in the elder’s circle, and with this writing, I realize that I have made happiness highly conditional. My happiness has always been a product of my circumstances, instead of myself. By holding on to my anxious response to each and every coming moment, I have trapped myself in a non-existent and totally fabricated future, which would determine my well-being. I kept looking forward because happiness existed out there, instead of in here, where I am.

I realize that circumstances don’t have to determine my happiness. I don’t have to attend to the future. That is a choice; it is a reflection of where I want to place my attention. I could be happy as a day-to-day attitude. I could choose to focus my attention on my marvelous ability to respond creatively to each moment. I have been granted the gift of not being a machine, with a pre-determined range of choices, I get to meet each moment naked. This freedom scares me. It seems like too much. I could easily fall or fail. I do all the time! But, I know that this is the way to learn to fly. And, I am happy discovering that this too is part of the potential that has been granted to me by Life.

It turns out that I can be happy. I am alive, and I have been prepared for just this much choicefulness. I may be disabled, brain-damaged and egotistical, but I still get to have enough choice about how I relate to things that I can be happy. And, you know the strangest, and best, part of it all, is that I just have to be me, to be happy.

Knowing I can fly isn’t the same as flying, but it is enough to render me happier. Knowing that flying, that being my self, is a service to the world, that makes me feel something else………. a grateful awe.

l/d