If only…

“If only this was different”, I hear this a lot.
Usually the difference desired is small, it’s a centimeter in a whole house, a letter in a whole paragraph. “If only I could have 95 instead than 94”, said with a melancholy certainty that 95 would really mean happiness and, even more importantly, the end of the cycle. “At 95 I’d really stop with wanting one more. 95 will really be enough.”

When we say it, we believe it. It looks so obvious to us how miserable 94 is and how great 95 would be. In our heads these illogical illusions are not only possible, but very common. The deeper we live inside it, the easier it will be to be convinced of something so incredible. It’s incredible for two reasons:

1. There is clearly just one number between 94 and 95
2. Part of us knows we won’t stop there once we get to 95

Perfection, wholeness, everything-ness, completion, these are all illusions that get very prolific the deeper we get into the folds of our mind, but hardly existent in the real world. “If only my lover was a bit more understanding” doesn’t make us confront the reality of their (or our) lacks, only creates an alternate reality where we can submerge ourselves with what-ifs. These what-ifs make our life more livable, because it all happens behind our eyes, tussen mijn oren as they say here. Between my ears.

“If only” is a line that has no end, while we keep telling ourselves that it does. It’s a guarantee of unhappiness and unfulfillment, it’s how we make sure of always working more, not because we want to add to what we have, but because we want to fill what we don’t have. The thing is, when we battle so hard for that tiny change that seems such a game changer to us, what we are really moving between is 0 and 100 — where we think we are, and where we hope we’d be.

Grandiosity is a need, full-ness is a response to (fear of) emptiness. What that sentence really says is: “If only I was perfect, I could stop worrying about being nothing”.

And while we feed our mind this losing game, we don’t work for improvement nor handle holes, because we’re moving between two things that don’t exist and we’ll never get to: “all” and “nothing”. And we miss the life that really exists, the one of “a bit”, “maybe”, “who knows”, “one day”, “I’ll try”, “it’s pretty good already”.