As my friend Sharif said to me the other day, “If you’re hungry, you know what you want. You get food, and you’re happy. But when you’re rich, there’s nothing you can’t have, and that’s hard.”
Desire and denial are necessary components of satisfaction. The cycle can’t exist without them. And that’s the great thing about goals. They make you want things. They connect you deeper with your own life. But they also leave you hanging. Worse yet, the further you get, the murkier it becomes, as complexity grows and predictability declines. It can be rewarding and wonderful, but it can also leave us queasy and uneasy, as change shows us more of ourselves than we really want to know. Not just how much we can achieve, but how limited we are and what we can’t achieve.
Of course, it’s not so much what we can’t do, as what we can’t do in the time we’d hoped, and those are not to be confused. But the results are often an unfathomable mix as perplexing as purifying, and the problem is that like a meal at the end of a day, sometimes, we just want to go to bed satisfied.
So we look for tangible proof of the intangible – evidence of our ability, our success, our accomplishment, and even our identity. Money, most commonly, but maybe fame, recognition, how much we own, how much we get, the site traffic we have, or statistics and analytics. Invariably, we’re drawn to the measures that most reflect our level of success and not our level of failure. But they are a poor substitute and a limited summation for the totality of our being. And, worse, in the face of small upticks, initial signs of success, and false positives they can easily quell the hunger we have for being more than we are, which is the very desire that lets us be who we are.
This is a time of the tangible. We manifest the self in the things we own, wear, and have. It’s hard not to think if we just had this camera, this many followers, or this budget we would be who we wanted to be. But these are not the things we need. It is exactly when we don’t have the camera, the followers, and the budget that we discover our best selves. Have faith in what you can do. Have faith in your ability, what you believe in, and where life will go. These things will get you through the nights of uncertainty even when you haven’t made it to your destination. But protect the desire and stay hungry. It isn’t a burden. It is a blessing. To seek is to live.
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