Desire

Consider what moves within us. Fear, greed, love, envy, curiosity, shame, guilt, regret, joy, bliss, happiness, pride, sadness, loneliness, and others. We encounter these in different measures, under different circumstances, and sometimes struggle to find a name for what we feel. Yet through them we recognize something of one another: that we share the same consciousness... a human consciousness. Being in the wonderment of being human and the human experience.

That we are intrinsically the same. Though our objects of desire may differ, we are in this together.

There is something of my own humanity that I recognize in yours. Our perspectives differ. What awakens joy in one may leave another unmoved. Yet joy itself gives us something through which to understand each other.

What one calls success, another may have no wish to possess. What one celebrates as a gain, another may experience as a loss. But we know something of wanting. We know something of losing. We know something of desire, ambition, and purpose. We know the anticipation of something set to arrive and the silence of something that will not return.

The man in the woods may fear the coming winter. The man in the high-rise may fear that he can no longer afford his home. Their circumstances require different answers, but each may recognize the uncertainty in the other.

Can we begin there?

Before I agree with what you desire, can I understand that you desire? Before I judge what has frightened you, can I remember what fear has asked of me? Before I agree, may I look to myself before I look to you?

Someone once asked me, “What is desire?”

I said, “It is the lingering of dead roses. The memory of what yet has to arrive.”

The roses have died, yet their fragrance remains. Or rather, the fragrance of roses is there, but they have not arrived.

Consider this as an image of desire. We may carry the impression of something after it has departed, or become familiar with its imagined presence before it has come.

I enter the room and remember what stood upon the table. Perhaps I remember who brought them. Perhaps I remember who I was when they arrived.

Perhaps I remember what may be in anticipation. As to say, I remember as to what will be there.

I have imagined the flowers upon the table. I have imagined the person at the door. I have returned to that afternoon in thought, though the afternoon itself has not yet come. What I recognize is the expectation I have carried. It has become familiar enough to feel like memory.

And when I enter the room, something seems to be missing.

What am I wishing to recover?

Something that once was? Or something I believed would be there? Can I feel the absence of a life I have anticipated so deeply that I have already made a place for it within my own?

The flowers? The person? The afternoon? Or something within myself that I have come to believe can appear only if the world arranges itself as I remember—or as I imagine?

Notice how much we can ask of a rose.

Desire can remain after its object has departed. It can remain because we believe its object is still meant to arrive. We may find ourselves tending to the place we have prepared for it.

It can reach toward something we have never known… a home, a friendship, a life we have imagined but have not yet lived. We must attend to what it asks. Some desires lead us toward nourishment, companionship, discovery. Others keep us tending to an absence while the living world waits at our door.

This is a question of self-government.

What will I do with what I feel? What does my desire ask of my hands, my time, my neighbor? Can I examine it without shame? Can I accept that its presence does not settle what I ought to do—or what ought to have been?

A nation must leave room for this examination. Its people will love different things. They will grieve losses that others scarcely notice. They will imagine futures that their neighbors cannot yet understand.

Though our objects of desire may differ, we are in this together.

You have stood in a room after someone has left it.

Perhaps you have also waited in a room for someone who never came.

So have I.

Let us be careful with what remains.

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