On the Importance of Wanting

A friend recently made a distinction for me between the two questions: What do I want? and What do I really want? These are both interesting and important questions—questions that have the power to help us align our lives and actions with what is most deeply true for us.

What do I want? is a question that turns our attention inward. Many of us were taught that our focus should be on the needs and wants of the people around us. Focusing on ourselves is egotistical and selfish. Being a good person means helping the people around us happy so that we can be happy. Or we learned to be aware of what others want so we can act strategically to move toward our desired outcome. Either way (and these two approaches are more similar than they appear on the surface), the focus is on the actions and feelings of others.

What do I want? turns the focus to the one person who is often ignored—me. Byron Katie writes about three kinds of business: my business, your business and God’s business. My business is everything I feel, think and do. Your business is everything you think, feel and do. God’s business is everything else. Katie points out that we make ourselves unhappy when we spend time in anything other than our own business. When I focus on what I think you should do or say, or how others should behave, I am setting myself up for disappointment. And when I spend time in your business or God’s business, I get lonely because I’ve abandoned myself.

What do I want? brings me back into the equation. It contradicts the common gremlin that we should not think about ourselves or our own needs. Not being aware of our needs and desires in any situation leaves us in the position of dependence. We outsource our self-care others then get upset when they don’t give us what we want and need. This dependence on other’s mind-reading is a set-up for frustration, resentment and unhappiness.

However, being aware of our immediate needs and wants is only part of any given situation. What do I really want? is a question that has the potential to bring us to another level of awareness. As humans, our wants and needs are endless. I want a cup of coffee. I want a new plant for the garden. I want to write another book. I want to be a famous author. Fulfilling our proximal needs may lead to an immediate sense of relief and accomplishment, but the initial thrill quickly passes and we’re back to desiring the next thing.

I’m reminded of a friend who had his heart set on getting a house on the coast of Maine. I asked him what a house on the coast would give him. He said it would give him a great view of the ocean in its changing seasons. Being a life-coach, I asked him again what that would give him. He paused for a moment, then said that would give him a sense of the beauty of the world. When I repeated my question a third time, he got really quiet and said ‘a sense of inner serenity.’ I pointed out that many people have wonderful houses on the coast of Maine and do not, as far as I can tell, have a sense of inner serenity.

What my friend really wanted was inner serenity. Asking the question What do I really want? can be a way to take us beyond our desires and demands of the moment into a deeper realm of true intention. As long as we’re acting without awareness of what it is we really want, any fulfillment we encounter will be fleeting.

It’s not that personal dreams and goals are bad, but rather that when we know what we really want, we can focus on that even as we take steps toward specific and concrete objectives. Going back to my friend, if what he really wants is inner serenity, then he can practice that wherever he is – whether he is still in Ohio or looking at real estate in Maine.

The things we want most are rarely contingent upon external circumstances. What is it that you really want? What would it be like to hold this question with you as you move through your day today?

Present Memories

My memories of growing up are a mixture of feeling supported and feeling alone. It was clear that my parents loved me but I was haunted, from as early as I can remember, by a terrible sense of loneliness. Terrible is too strong a word, for there were (and are) many times I remember of feeling connected and safe with my family of origin.

I fondly recall riding in the car on long trips. In my memories, there are always six of us: me, my older brother, my two younger sisters, my Mom and my Dad. There were endless negotiations about who got to sit where. The space in between Mom and Dad was most coveted one, especially late at night because sometimes you got to sleep with you head in Mom’s lap and your feet in Dad’s lap.

I loved being so close. These people were my world and I lived with an unspoken fear that one or more of them would go away—or was it more the fear that I would be exiled, thrown out of the garden for some unknowable reason?   Either way, the car held us together. Long trips meant that we were going somewhere special like Grandmother and Granddad’s house or, even better, to our slightly ramshackle cottage on the Lake in Vermont where Dad wouldn’t go off to work and we would be together for weeks at a time. And even if my father was angry when we finally pulled out of the driveway because it had taken so long to pack up and get on the road, I knew he would eventually calm down and would start singing.

When my Dad sang in the car, we all joined in. Thinking back, I’m sure that singing in the car with his beloved family was a place of safety and connection for him as well. The world and its incessant demands and confusions passed away and we were just all together, breathing the same air and gratefully eating whatever my mother had packed to sustain us on the trip. My father’s repertoire was a mish-mash of Broadway tunes like My Favorite Things, hits from the forties and fifties like Ragtime Cowboy Joe and church camp songs like Michael Row the Boat Ashore. It didn’t matter much what we sang, my father sang with an enthusiasm and commitment that was contagious.

Many years later, on his deathbed, the four of us children (and his final family but not his middle family) were gathered around and sang to him as the nurse removed his breathing mask. He startled and struggled for a moment, then slowly passed away. I used to think ‘passing away’ was a euphemism that avoided the harsh reality of death. But that day, it wasn’t a harsh reality, it was more of a relief and an astonishment. Something unbelievably sad and sacred was going on. Saying ‘he died’ misses so much. Though he certainly did die—he stopped breathing and became awe-fully still. He was clearly not with us anymore, but where he went and how he did it after hours and days and months of struggle was (and is) a complete mystery.

But those long hours in the car driving and the songs of my childhood are still with me to this day. And they all intermingle with the songs of his death and the ancient and vast feelings of separation. The immeasurable past life that is fully present in this very moment. No separation.

Language is so inadequate to describe how much happens all together. Were you lonely or were you part of a close family unit? Language pushes us to blanket generalizations that miss so much the mish mash of our actual experience. In reality, so much more is happening simultaneously than we could ever describe. Language highlights one explores some dimensions of this richness while it dismisses other equally important realities.

So this morning I remember the importance of telling many stories about whatever is happening and whatever happened. Whatever you think this is is only a partial description that can shift and change and allow even more to be revealed. And maybe sometimes, or maybe many times, we can allow the stories to drop away and allow the activity of the moment to be fully enough to hold us.

God’s Acre

I walked to God’s Acre with a friend yesterday. Of course, in one light you could say we are always walking to or walking on God’s acre, but this was different. We began on a small path at the edge of a community ball field (empty but well-maintained) about a half-mile from the Boundless Way Temple where I live.

It was a lovely afternoon for a walk in the woods. The morning rain and clouds were dispersing and the air temperature perfectly in the low 70’s. The trees here in central Massachusetts are just starting their annual display of fall colors. The first reds and oranges are appearing in the mostly green landscape. Yellow leaves are already dropping to guild the sidewalks and paths around town.

God’s Acre is a parcel of over 300 acres of wooded land that is currently being managed for recreational use by the Greater Worcester Land Trust. This particular site gets its name from the ten acres it contains that were owned in the mid-eighteenth century by a local mystic named Solomon Parsons who believed the world was going to end in 1843.

Apparently, things were not going so smoothly in that time either. The mid-nineteenth century gave rise to numerous utopian and millennial cults. The urge to escape the confines of traditional culture that led to the countercultural movement of the 60’s and 70’s that I was on the fringe of, was a well-worn tradition in America.

My friend and I walked for thirty or forty minutes – appreciating the gift of the autumn woods and the company of each other. I’ve known this friend for almost thirty years and in the last few we’ve developed the practice of deep conversation and occasional long walks. Any topic is fair game—from updates on the grandchildren to reflections on our increasingly evident mortality to reports our latest efforts to decipher our ongoing the struggles and triumphs.

Yesterday, it was the usual rambling conversation, accompanied by some heavy breathing as we followed the winding and hilly trail. Eventually the narrow path widened out to what had clearly been a road. Along this grassy way were a couple of square holes, clearly where houses had stood many decades ago, now filled with trees like the rest of the area.

Just after catching our first sight of some current-day houses to our left, we went through a gate and came to a jumble of rocks—the large post-glacial type that can be ten or fifteen feet high and lie in apparently random places among the trees. Glacial erratics, I think they are called.

By now the sun was shining through the trees, illuminating the fallen leaves and the perfectly strewn boulders. My friend wandered around a little and finally found it–the rock on which Solomon had paid a local artisan $125 to inscribe a legal document deeding this land to God. It’s now known as deed rock and apparently the inscribed words were the basis of an extended court case over who this land belonged to. I’m told that God eventually lost the case because he had neglected to sign his name to the document so the land passed into other hand—temporarily.

I was touched to see this wet rock bearing the marks of holy intention from a fellow local spiritualist from 180 years ago. Maybe I should begin work carving some new agreement with the Universe on one of the rocks behind our Zen Temple? I think Solomon would approve.

On Not Watching the Debate

It turns out that drinking espresso in the late afternoon, actively not watching the first Presidential debate and reading a disturbing novel in bed are not a great recipe for a restful nights sleep. Who could have guessed?

I did, however, get to hear the wind kick up and blow the trees around. I got to imagine the leaves falling fast and furiously into the Temple koi pond and wonder if the skimmer would clog and prevent the water from reaching the pump and eventually cause the motor to burn out. I also got to begin counting backwards from fifty (to switch on my para-sympathetic nervous system (whatever that is)) a number of times. Even with beginning again somewhere near I stopped, I still didn’t get past 22 and whatever sleep inducing benefits that were supposed to come from that were lost on me.

I lay what seemed to be long hours on my uncomfortable comfortable bed. Finally I began simply to notice the breath going in and out of my body. I wondered if I will be so distressed when I am lying in my bed and truly unable to get up. At some point, morning will not be the release, but rather simply the time when I lie in bed in the light rather than the dark. How will I be with myself then?

Last night, however, I was not distressed, just worried. I remembered any number of times when people and organizations and I have been in turmoil and how it all seems to have a life of its own in my head during the dark hours. Part of me wants to release and relax, but part of me won’t or can’t let go. Some inner necessity decides that active worry is required and I am helpless to decide otherwise.

It’s a wonderful example of the elephant that Jonathan Haidt writes of in The Righteous Mind. He says our thinking processes are like an elephant and a rider. Most of what we think occurs below the level of our conscious awareness—the elephant. Our conscious mind is the rider—the little person sitting atop the elephant that is supposed to be making the decisions. I suppose that with a skilled rider and a well-trained elephant, things could go quite well. But, apparently, my elephant and rider mind could use some remedial work.

That’s why I meditate. It doesn’t save me from my life, but at least I get to see some of the dynamics up close. In Zen meditation, our vow as we sit still and upright is to cultivate a basic friendliness toward ourselves and our actual experience of the moment. We’re not trying to cultivate special states of mind but rather to be present with our minds, hearts and bodies as they actually are. What I and millennia of Zen meditators have discovered from this practice is that the mind is constantly active, that everything that arises passes away and that disturbance is unavoidable.

And last night I was disturbed by the debate I didn’t watch earlier between Joe Biden and Donald Trump – two men who have thrust themselves into a realm of power and intrigue that is playing out in front of our eyes. I chose not to watch because I knew it would be too upsetting to me. My nervous system is on high alert already, without having to watching Trump perform his mesmeric and terrible combination of lies and mean-spirited attacks of everyone who disagrees with him.

I hope that Biden held his own—that he remembered to use the time to talk about his vision for America—that he conveyed a sense of decency and embodied some kind of hope for reconciliation. Reconciliation requires acknowledgment of truth. Something that Trump appears incapable of.

I thought of getting up to read reports of how it went. But my rider had the good sense to realize that that would not be good for the elephant if we wanted any sleep.   So we stayed in bed. Me and my unruly elephant. Though he’s rather wrinkly and occasionally misbehaved, I do love and trust his unspoken wisdom. Sometimes he’s much wiser than me and sometimes he needs me to remind him of the simplest things. Like that the breath is precious and that even this place of disturbed resting is just the momentary scenery of my ever-changing life.

The rain eventually came. Then I opened my eyes in the dark and it was morning. I don’t know how or when I got to sleep, but am grateful for the release that always finds me at some point. I can never tell whether I have done something that has led to my good fortune or if it’s just the random and wondrous correlations of the universe.

On Vacation

Just back from three days on Cape Cod. I meant to take my computer but somehow, I forgot. (What would Freud say?) I then meant to use my phone post a pithy notice of my absence on my blog. But the sand and the family got the best of me. Besides playing with my grandson, a deep walk-and-talk with my daughter and a final afternoon beach walk on the tidal flats with my wife, the highlight of my time was sunrise over the Atlantic. Once behind the clouds and once in full view of the scattering of viewers along the seemingly endless beach.

The first morning I went to watch, it took me it took me a while to find my way from the parking lot to the beach. I had woken in the dark with no computer to write on. I thought ‘Oh, I’ll just relax and sleep in.’ But being only five minutes from watching the sun rise over the Atlantic, I couldn’t resist. So I got up in the dark and drove the empty roads to Coast Guard Beach.

I’ve been to that particular beach a number of times over the past three years. We’ve made a tradition of going to the Cape in the late summer—after high tourist season—with our daughter and her family. We’ve always stayed in places in the Eastham area—right above the elbow of the Cape. Access to the geographic, retail and cultural delight of Provincetown as well as the dramatic beaches of the Atlantic shore and the quiet beaches of the Bay side make it the perfect place for us. (Not to mention its easy access to ‘Buddha Bobs’ our favorite Asian themed jumble of jewelry, statues and artifacts.)

Beach access from the small parking lot at Coast Guard beach goes by the outdoor showers and down through the dunes to the water. But when I followed the signs and went by the showers, I saw the usual entrance had been blocked off. Obeying the new signs, I went back to the road, down a few hundred yards and to another entrance through the dunes. After I walked back south along the beach, I saw the problem. Erosion from storms and water rise had been so much that the original path from the parking lot ended in a five-foot drop. I was surprised and slightly disturbed.

The whole of Cape Cod is a shifting piece of real estate. While all houses by the sea are now endangered, Cape Cod is a large deposit of sand that is in constant motion. The Atlantic side beaches are in slow but inexorable retreat from the storms and waves that batter the sometimes high dunes. The light house up the coast from where I was has been moved time and time again. What seems safe and reasonable now will be precarious and impossible in just a few years.

But maybe because of all this, The Atlantic coast of the upper Cape is a wonderful, wild and dramatic place to walk. The public seashore goes on for mile and miles. I used to love to swim in the big waves. But between the sharks that are now occasional but very real visitors and my slowly eroding body, I’m happy to be an early morning walker.

Walking south toward the entrance of the Great Salt Pond, I was overtaken scores of times by seals swimming past. Their dark snouts are unmistakable as they swim in the shallow water close to shore—at ease with the waves and in no fear of us beach walkers. A couple years ago I walked all the way down to the entrance to the Great Salt Pond itself. There I saw scores of seals hauled up on convenient sand islands sunning themselves. Protected from the waves and the sharks, they too were enjoying Cape life.

But this year, I just walked for twenty minutes as the sun rose. I stopped as the sun poked up over the horizon to do some Qi Gong and take some photos. Then I walked back to the car and drove back to the protections, delights and challenges of family. I started the oatmeal cooking (late) and greeted my grandson who had decided, for the moment, that only his mother’s arms would suffice in that tender morning moment when the world was just beginning to reconstitute itself once more.