Wanting - Desire and Possibility

All wanting is suffering. What you are is in everything and what is everything is in you.

But we can’t live this way unless we have stood shoulder to shoulder with death. And so the question we must answer in our everyday lives is: how, how much, how badly should we want?

The great mystery in life is knowing which suffering is necessary, and which is needless. The simple truth is: it is wanting which decides whether our suffering is needless, or whether it holds a purpose.

There are many kinds of wanting. And some are worthier, truer, wholer.

There’s negative wanting. That is wanting what others have, often largely because they have it. This is negative because of course we wish implicitly or explicitly to deprive others. Whatever the object of wanting might be, the logic is the same. Egoistic, adversarial, and superficial.

Wishing to deprive others results in needless suffering. Not just for them, but also for us. We have reduced life to a game of taking, allocating, not creating, transforming, renewing, building. And so we do not add anything to human life and it’s vast and beautiful possibilities this way. We suffer when we fail to win the game of negative wanting – but we suffer more and worse when we succeed.

And yet, if you sit and hold it with me, perhaps you will see. Negative wanting is where most of spend our lives, isn’t it? We wish we had someone’s else’s job, career, lovers, money, fortune. We try to live their way. And so we never create us, our lives, our selves, give our gifts.

Then there is positive wanting. Positive wanting isn’t centered on deprivation. It’s object is to give what isn’t had by anyone. If negative wanting is taking from, then positive wanting is giving to. Not just by taking, but really giving what isn’t yet had. Positive wanting is the desperate and beautiful quest to give one’s gift, better the world, change, transform, build, create.

When Jonas Salk dreamed of a vaccine for the terrible malady of polio, when Sir Tim created the www, that was positive wanting. As it is in the tiny moments when you and I dream, rebel, forgive, witness, speak, love.

Now our suffering holds a purpose. We are broken in the journey towards a mighty destination. We are bringing human possibility into being. And that alone gives us a sense of coming home.

In the end, we ask: what went wrong? Whether it is a world, a country, a time, or a life, one answer remains the same. We chose negative over positive wanting. And so condemned ourselves to futility. Just as a society based on negative

wanting ends up inevitably like contemporary America, predatory, so a life based of negative wanting eats its young, it’s truth, it’s possibility. And so whatever it is, a thing of negative wanting crumbles from within. It’s suffering leads it nowhere.

But a thing of positive wanting, of impossible wishes for soil and spring, grows. Not straight. But true.