What role desires play in your life?
Desires don’t always lead to pain, its our relationship with them that some time does. We carry unchecked desires with us, that from time to time play major role in our life, sometimes for the worst. They do give us pleasure but its a double edged sword.
Unchecked desires
Like the name suggests they come into our being when we are not fully aware of ourselves. Modern lifestyle demands that we stay on constant move and for that we must learn quickly from our environment, how to be most efficient at living, striving, achieving etc. We establish a strong connection with similar life-stylers and sometimes this leads to having an unchecked desire. Sometimes we believe that if we get to point A, we will be close to reaching point B and Point A becomes an unchecked desire. Envy plays big part in bringing an unchecked desire into our being. We want to be like someone, because we think, that other person is having great time, having that object of desire in their life. We don’t even know the feeling that will come from the process or achieving that desire, or even having that object. There are many other situations where we believe that it requires us to have object of desire in order to improve our experience of life. It comes into our being when we are not thinking rationally, we are jumping from one thing to another and all of a sudden, we see that having object of desire, our life will be more fulfilled. And we allow that desire to be grounded in us.
We compromise on bigger goal of our life and go on a quest to achieve this new unchecked desire. But that very process of unchecked desire creates a feeling of lacking, something missing, subtle anxiety, constant craving to do something. It’s like another person living inside us and constantly reminding us to go after the desire. There is a time gap between desire rising and achievement of it. And through out that time, we are constantly distracted from our daily activities (looking after our mental, physical health, sleeping, having better relationship, work etc.). Its a subtle distraction, but if we think of how many other unfulfilled desires we have, it makes a huge difference on quality of our lives. Specially, if we are doing something that means a lot to us, the amount of energy/attention it needs, is compromised. We can deal with few unresolved issues in life but if they keep mounting up, it seems impossible at times.
Even if we achieve the object of desire, we are caught up in wrong cycle. As soon as we achieve it, we feel great/happy/satisfied/fulfilled etc. But be careful this feeling is not always coming from object of desire itself, it is the subsiding of the symptoms that it created in the beginning. Initial feeling of lacking is completely gone, we feel happy. I compare this feeling with ‘feelings of a prisoner getting out of jail’, as if he has never been outside prison and doesn’t know the feeling of being free, in fact he was free before he went to prison. And because we are on a constant move, we don’t see this process either (we hardly pay attention to what is happening inside us). We move on with life, comes another new desire, this time we pay even less attention to it and accept it. And begins another cycle. Sometimes we even forget what kind of life we wanted to have. And our priority changes to dealing with our problems that rose from these distractions.
Desires with good possibilities
If we somehow have desire that we can only bring to light whenever we want and leave them on side the rest of the time. That could be a good option, as long as we can manage it successfully. Instead of creating desires on the move, can we carefully examine all facets of it? Like, what we will need to do to achieve it, how long will it take, how will it affect our quality of life during the process, are we seriously lacking the object of our desire in our life, or it is something that will clearly help us with the bigger goal of life, are we craving it out of envy/jealousy/other unchecked emotions, is there any other way around it to avoid it at all? And then we make a plan on how much energy/time to spend on this new found desire. We only think of it when we are doing some practical work on it, the rest of the time we leave it on side. We stay fully present in our being as usual and as soon as we notice any unnecessary feelings/thoughts related to this desire, we take extra care to make sure that its not distracting us from our present.
It could be a good thing in life to have a desire, it takes us to different places, it opens up new possibilities of life, we feel more alive when something turns us on. And on the journey to achievement we face challenges, we expand our boundaries, we rise above our current state and go after it. It motivates us when we are facing obstacles, difficulties and sense of vulnerability that may rise during the process. We learn something new about ourselves, we face our weaknesses, we have a motivation to work on our weaknesses, we come out better version on the other side. Even if we fail we learn a real (practical) lesson that will come in handy the next time. The whole process sparks up a life in us. It fills us up with real joy of being alive (not the object of desire but the process of achieving it)
I am on a journey to improve my life experience and often I find myself desiring, and I do pay full attention to it, most of the time I find that ‘I could do without them’. I am not sure what minimalism means but I am practising to own less things as much as possible (so, material things hardly intrigue me). Other times I feel challenged and they fit into my bigger goal of life, and I do embrace them. I do give them full attention to my ability, be fully present during the process, I also allow it to change my habits (only if they serve me well in long run). It’s more like, I use those desires to make me a better version of myself. And writing this blog is one of them, it does come with lot of challenges (specially when English is not my first language, never wrote anything more than a email, no experience of creating web-sites etc.). But to learn something new about myself, whilst having fun is my bigger goal of this life.