It's been a good year for me. I feel like I keep achieving new levels of personal awareness and social/emotional consciousness. The simple key to unlocking these potentials: desire, discipline, and difficulty. I would like to share my thoughts on these three tools of self-realization, as I have come to understand them. This first post will deal with the first tool--desire.
The desire to change oneself would probably be at the top of most people's wishlist. For me, a great deal of my life has been spent with an incessant background discomfort with myself. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with my surroundings or my life--instead, the nagging feeling that something wasn't right inside was coming from precisely there: inside. By constantly engaging the fantasizing part of my brain (imagining a future where I was a somebody--usually defined by whatever career I thought I wanted), the desire to be a different person led to the development of discomfort with the person I already was. This wasn't that intolerable for most of my life, but as my 20's moved along, thoughts began to emerge informing me that I was running out of time, that because I hadn't yet found my place, calling, or even began to develop a skill-set to carry me into a career, that I would never achieve the vague Babylonian dream to "make it."
I was growing up, and so the question that is so integral to everyone's upbringing, "What do I want to be when I grow-up?" was forced to change. Now it was, "I'm grown-up now, but who am I?" It felt like I had spent so much time focused on the first question, I never took time to answer the second. Looking back, I see that I had the question completely backwards. How could someone know what they want yet not know their own self? Desire alone was not enough to answer that question, and as I did pick up the tools I needed to find out about me, my understanding of desire finally flipped around.
Desire to achieve great things is not bad. Attachment to a specific outcome, on the other hand, is where dissonance lives. With any plan a person makes in life, whether it's a plan for the afternoon, a ten-year career plan, or a plot for world domination, there's an interesting consistency: nothing goes according to plan. Life simply doesn't work that way, and nobody needs that fact explained to them--we've all experienced it daily. The beautiful aspect of this is that many of life's greatest moments come when we least expected them, and in fact trying to stick to a personal plan of how life's myriad situations should unfold will only leave a person feeling disappointment or fury. The Joker would certainly agree with the idea that the more strict a planner a person is, the easier it is for them to be thrown off their game or upset by disruptions. This attachment to outcomes is where desire's dark side manifests, and compromising decisions are made, justified by the ends.
The fear of an outcome that doesn't match one's desires is inextricably linked to our common fear of death. When things don't go your way and you freak out, you're essentially leading yourself to believe that you only had one chance, and it's gone. We've all heard that we should live like we could die at any second, and while many people who say that are trying to encourage living in the moment, the logic of the statement is flawed by fear. When I think that way, that I could die tomorrow, it's more likely to initiate panic than comfort. Why not flip around language of the sentiment? What if we didn't fear death like it was holding up a stopwatch and staring at us like a creepy gym teacher? A beautiful soul once told me not to live like the dying. Wake up each morning in wonder, like a long-dead hero who has miraculously been returned to life after a thousand years of sleep.
That's when desire transforms, from a gnawing void inside into a simple beautiful question: "I'm awake, so what do I want?"
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