Wanting Wanted

 

We are creatures who do not get to choose between what we want and what is wanted of us, and we seem to embody the full vulnerabilities of love only when we dwell at the moving frontier between this wanting and being wanted.

David Whyte, Consolations

 

Our lives unfold at the edge of “what we want and what life wants of us.” It is a rich and loamy place of possibility, mystery, and vulnerability.  When we engage with life as it is at that edge, we learn humility, courage, and faith.  We experience our lives as they really are and not how we hope they would be.  And with that clear sightedness can discern next steps with more equanimity. 

 

For a long while I longed for a life that was easy, safe, and satisfying.  Where I would be free from anxiety, fear, and loss.  It was a fantasy but one I still hoped for imagining a cottage by a lake, work that gave me purpose but not stress, community of family and friends to shelter me from loneliness.  If not this whole picture, perhaps I could find enough of this kind of peace to keep fear away. 

 

Paradoxically, it was only after I experienced an unexpected and desolating loss that I began to let go of this fantasy of ease and peace and through that letting go found a way to integrate pain into my life rather trying to escape it.  Being with myself when I was in pain with compassion gave me a doorway into the deeper parts of myself. In that holding with compassion, I found more space to accept myself and the ways in which my life was unfolding even during difficult times. The unbearable was still unbearable but I was able to hold it from a more spacious consciousness which gave me more wholeness.

 

I am letting go of needing things to be a specific way, aiming my heart at a much bigger target of open present awareness. My goal is not so much about achievement of a specific goal but to become more aware of what I am grasping or pushing away and why and where my heart is opening, where it is closing.  When what is wanted of me feels unbearable, I can sometimes find ways to be with the parts of myself that cannot bear what is happening rather than pushing these parts away in shame or disgust.  I give myself the gift of giving up and in that surrender discover what is coming in through a deeper interior place to give me buoyancy and space.  When everything is falling apart, I feel the grief, allow the unraveling, and the relief of not having to hold together what needs room to grow.