There’s all these great song lyrics about wanting.
Queen (“I want it all, and I want it now), The Rolling Stones (“you can’t always get what you want), Beatles (“I want to hold your hand”), Sex Pistols (“I wanna be anarchy”).
And there's about a million contemporary songs about wanting things, things, and more things.
There’s lyrics about people in love wanting each other, and people in love wanting to be wanted.
Want is a big thing in the human experience.
The Buddhists talk about want, too, about how it’s the heart of suffering. Then, of course, there’s the role of want (or perhaps better, “desire”), in most monotheistic religions, where it’s the root of sin and damnation. Finally, there’s physical, carnal want: the force beginning and ending billions of relationships, the driver behind lies, manipulations, betrayals. Want is a big, big thing in the human experience.
But want is not just a bad, tormenting thing. It’s also the beating heart of what makes us human.
We want to live and stay alive. We want to have pleasure. We want to be held, and to hold. Want is the driver behind love, romance, literature, art. It is the driver of the human experience.
The tragedy is actually when one stops wanting. This thought came into my mind today as I met with a young client I’ve been working with for some time. He is an intelligent, passionate and principled young man (principled to the point that it causes him great angst). He works in the helping field, supporting some of our society’s most vulnerable. He wants the world to be better than it is.
He also wants a stable, secure and affordable place to live. (Victoria is a massively expensive city, and believe it or not, front line work with society’s most vulnerable doesn’t usually make a person rich. And briefly while I’m on that, how could we ever let it get so unmanageably expensive for our young adults? It hurts them. They want to have a good place to live, and they want to be able to afford it. Why shouldn’t they? In my client’s case, these unmet needs have led to a very difficult time.) He has been down, and disheartened for several months.
But, as I told him today, I am glad he continues to want. Because, to use my own variation of Tennyson’s fabled phrase, it is better to want and not have, than to not want at all.
The greatest depths of human darkness come when people stop wanting. It’s the bottom rung of the ladder of hope -> disappointment -> despair -> apathy. It’s a state of learned helplessness, in which one has given up on trying, on striving towards some form of embetterment. It’s the place where hope is lost.
If you’re still in the disappointment stage, you are much better off. Because you can have things. You can have better things than you have right now. You can have better and more, and healthier. But, as I harp on all the time, you’re going to have to go after them, and pursue them, and create them.
Want, then seek. Try then fail. Recompose yourself and try again. Succeed. Want more.