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