The person who really knows what they want has a good reputation in our society. Assertive, voracious, desiring and desirable. “She really knows what she wants”, similar to “he’s a self made man”. Almost a mythological creature.
Raised by wolves or aliens, the person who knows what she wants is usually a doer. She sees, she aims, she hits, she puts in her pocket. With a proud smirk she walks away, onto the next target. Focused on the goal at all times.
Are doers wanters though?
The question of “What do I want?” or “Why don’t I know what I want?” comes up often in sessions. Secondary only to “Who am I?”, when it’s in fact the same question, but easier to ask, and less painful not to know the answer to. After all, don’t we want others to be happy? And don’t we want to do a good job? Don’t we also want to stay together? It’d be hard to argue otherwise. I, for one, couldn’t tell my clients if their wants are genuine or not, only based on the content.
It’s very hard to draw a line between societally imposed wants and internally originated ones, especially if we agree there is no such thing as purely societal or purely internal, and none of the two would exist without the other.
Yet, how is it so easy to spot someone who knows where to locate themselves and their desires? Someone who’s not unaware or careless about others and society at large, but that knows where his belly is. Even without the ability to describe it in words, my visceral intuition can sense it quite accurately. And it’s almost never the doer.
The one who seems to be always ready with his hand to catch a fish in the water, to the point that he has forgotten to check whether he’s hungry or he even likes fish in the first place, is a perfect product of the historical moment we live in. I was recently listening to an interesting podcast on sex (Come as you are), and the theme of intercourse frequency led to Nagoski’s reflection: “Capitalism profits on us wanting things, not on cherishing having them”. It’s, like every beautiful insight, one that transcends disciplines and discourses. It can be applied to so much more than what it was meant to.
We are programmed by our system to always want. Next task, next project, next pair of shoes, next holiday, next challenge, next difficult yoga pose. But is this wanting? Or is it a perverse distortion of a desperate craving that can never be satiated?
If I can’t sit on the hill I climbed for longer than taking a picture, I was addicted to the climb, but I didn’t want the hill. If I have to force myself to be proud and happy for an accomplishment, just for the time of a celebration, then that accomplishment added nothing to my life.
Let’s be clear: moving from old to new is not something to demonize. Change is a necessity of our body, mind and our entire cultures need to burn some ground to fertilize the land.
Wanting in the sense of being oneself has little to do with seeing, spotting and grabbing. More with opening ourselves in the right places so the thing, the object of our blind desire, can see, spot and grab us. There’s a lot of receiving in wanting. A lot of happening.
The search for who we are exactly, and what our house should definitely look like, and what we can’t absolutely stand in a relationship, our hard lines and our rigid boundaries show more often than not how little we know about who we are and what we want, and how adamantly we are trying to trace that picture as neatly as possible to avoid the blur we host inside.
So how do we find out what we want? How do we learn the language of our desire?
If I had the answer I’d tell you, I swear. If anything because I believe a world made of people who harbor desires is a happier, healthier world. But there’s no manual, and beware of the ones who try to sell you one.
What I know is this: we are submerged by things. Not just objects, but thoughts, ideas, opinions. We often hold on to something because we’d like to be the ones who want that. All that space could be used for things we want a bit more truly, but we don’t get there because the idea of wanting certain things terrifies us. We are not guaranteed we’ll find passions that would make our parents proud, or tendencies that others will admire. So we stick to the usual, and see our motivation fade, our light dim. We become very good at doing things we’re instructed to do, and that becomes our real calling. Then we feel time is slipping away, but if we had more, we wouldn’t know what to do with it other than shoving things in it, and then feeling once more it was not enough.
Let’s be respectful towards our desires. They are not monstrous creatures, but also not the patinated, branded and profitable thing capitalism has told us it is. They have to be approached patiently, curiously and often carefully. We’ll find darkness too, and it’s exactly that fear that our false self feeds on. Being ready for the darkness that we are, being ready to never fully grasp it, to never fully own it, and to end up ultimately losing against it, but being reignited in our need to be alive by exactly that: having this companion beside us at all times, knowing that it has no intention to bring us down, but wants to show us who we are when no one’s looking.
Not so easy, is it? That’s why so many of us end up being doers.
Empatherapy 