the relentless tug of war between contentment and desire

There’s a parable I came across a long time ago — I don’t remember if it was a Zen tale or a Sufi story or an anecdote of some other origin.

Essentially, a man is on his way from one city (A) to another (B). En route, he encounters a mystic and asks the latter, “Is B a good place?”

In response, the mystic inquires, “I see you’re coming from A. How did you find it?”

“It was terrible,” replies the man. “The people were unkind, the traffic was terrible, and life was woefully hard on a day-to-day basis.”

“Oh,” says the mystic. “I must warn you then that you will find B to be exactly the same.”

Several days later, another traveller is on his way from A to B. He too encounters the mystic — who is perhaps either a permanent resident of that liminal spot or likes to show up there from time to time to play pranks on unsuspecting travellers like the two men in this tale. 

This second traveller too asks the mystic, “Is B a good place?”

Again, in response, the mystic inquires, “I see you’re coming from A. How did you find it?”

“It was awesome,” replies the man. “The people were kind, the markets were full and abundant, and every day was a splendid adventure.”

“Well,” says the mystic with a smile, “you’ll be thrilled to know that B is exactly the same. You’ll love it there!”

For the last several years, I’ve tried to live by the belief that if I were really content, I’d be happy no matter what. I wouldn’t desire to be someone else, somewhere else, doing something else.

When desire arose in me — desire for a more spacious kitchen or for backyard space, for instance — I’d try to quell it through counter-arguments.

“A bigger kitchen means there’d be more clutter on every visible surface!”

“We’re barely able to de-weed this small patch that runs around our house. How will we manage a larger backyard?”

But then the desires would crop up over and over again — desire for spaciousness, for beautiful surroundings — to the point that I’d feel annoyed with them or ashamed of myself for even having them in the first place.

My 2 a.m. conversations with the universe would often entail thoughts such as “Dear God, can you please not give me desires that I can’t fulfill?”

In desperate times, I’d look up what modern-day gurus and mystics have to say on the topic of desire. 

I’ve spent an enormous amount of time reading/watching/listening to content on this topic.

• The adage “Desire is the root cause of all suffering” is something I've grown up hearing the adults around me say often, especially when faced with disappointment.
• Another common aphorism is Happiness = Reality — Expectations (Desire), implying that greater acceptance of the as-is and fewer desires is the secret to happiness and contentment.
• Another popular quote has to do with choosing our attitude no matter the situation. Or focusing on the goodness we have in our lives; gratitude for what we have as opposed to longing for what we don’t have.
• One modern day guru explains that the issue with desire is that when it is fulfilled, a new desire replaces it. When it isn’t, we’re beset with depression and anger. So either which way, desire — whether it is fulfilled or not — is a big troublemaker. It is best to not demand anything of life but to do the needful in service to God.
• Even Jiddu Krishnamurti has said that he doesn’t demand anything from life. In other words, there is no desire for reality to be anything other than what it is.
• And then we have our modern-day manifestation gurus who want us to live in two simultaneous opposing realities — one in which to conjure up a dream and live and breathe as though it has already manifested, and the other in which that longing doesn't even exist because we're not to keep worrying about it and poking it every so often. Sounds like a real mind-f**k!

My mom used to tell me that if I am worried about something and keep thinking about it all the time, all my anxious thoughts and worries and constant overthinking would only serve to build a fence around it, a fence that God's grace cannot penetrate.

I'm still on the fence when it comes to the question of belief in God, but I can see the rationale in my mother's way of thinking. Overthinking rarely solves a problem. Letting it rest often allows space for a solution to emerge.

Needless to say, I’ve often felt conflicted in my relationship with desire and contentment. 

After all, isn’t desire for something needed to set ourselves goals and achieve them? Even an infant is driven by the innate desire to figure out how to walk.

This morning, I joyfully created a resume and sent in an application for a job posting.

After that when I decided to rest, and perhaps this was the doing of an idle mind that wasn't otherwise occupied, there rose in me a deep desire to have a job and an income.

It's something I've wanted for a while now, especially when I've spent much of the last decade very self-directed, in terms of both work and life.

I'm not saying I need someone to tell me what to do — I work very hard and diligently without needing deadlines or accountability partners — but I would love having the company of others to work alongside as well as some predictability around income in response to all my effort.

But when this desire arose, another part of me was prompt to squish it by arguing that balancing a job and spending time with D would be very hard.

I've lived with my brain long enough to understand that it perennially lives in that liminal space between longing and dread — longing for a wish to come true, but also dreading the inevitable changes that such fulfillment will bring, even if the changes are 'good'.

For instance, I've long wanted for D to have a friend in the neighbourhood to play with. Now that the child who lives across from us has begun coming out to play in the evenings, I'm mentally moaning that D will now have less time to spend with us.

It's as if my mind has built a fence of discontentment around itself so that it can brace itself for any disappointment that may arise.

If a desire is not fulfilled, my mind can simply say, "I told you so," and choose to be smug about it rather than encounter the disappointment.

And if a desire is fulfilled, God forbid, the mind will play some tricks to spoil something else, so that it can still turn around and say, "Not as great as you thought it would be. I told you so."

A few years earlier, when money was tight, I'd pray to the Universe to ease our financial strain. And in the very next breath, I'd worry that I'd somehow have to pay a steep price for such a desire to be fulfilled. A very specific thought was this — What if money came to me because someone close to me passed away?

Desire became a very complex phenomenon for me to deal with especially after I became a parent. Suddenly, everything felt high-stakes when darling little D came into my life.

At first, I found myself mistakenly thinking it was my utmost responsibility to ensure he got into the 'best' school and received the 'best' childcare and all the 'best' experiences that would make his childhood the 'best' ever.

Soon enough, I understood that I can only provide him with what I can within the real-life constraints of budget and time and our own physical and mental health. Then I took to believing that I ought to make the 'best' of what's available.

But, of course, wanting something to be the 'best' inevitably brings us to the reality that there'd always be something 'lacking'. A mind that compares does not do so selectively.

I had forgotten that on some days my 'best' could mean an entire morning spent reading in bed, and that comparing this to another 'best' day spent at the beach is merely another recipe for disaster.

Which made me begin to fear desire itself.

If D was unwell on a beautiful summer morning, then all I had to do was squash my desire to go to the beach, and that would keep me safe, right? No desire. No disappointment.

This probably explains my brief but unexpected foray into minimalism a few years ago. If I could learn to live with fewer things and expectations, then desire wouldn't upset my mental equilibrium every single time!

It took me a long while to understand that both my desire and my inability to realize it at that point in time and the disappointment that followed were valid.

I didn't have to let the prospect of disappointment keep me from wanting to go to the beach on another day.

I recently came across a post on LinkedIn — not by someone I know, but 'liked' by one of my connections (you can tell I'm still trying to figure my way around LinkedIn) — but it went something like this:

I don't know about you but the most gangsta sh*t I've ever done is reinvent my life completely instead of telling myself that I ought to be grateful for the life I had long outgrown.

~ Paraphrased, source unknown

Apparently, there's a meme going around in which people talk about 'the most gangsta sh*t they've ever done' ... and fill in the blank with a few words on personal growth.

The words above were put up by someone who is in the process of rebuilding their life and wanted to look back on this post as a reminder, say, five years from now.

They got me thinking ...

For a long time, I've struggled with wanting to move on from this life of writing fiction and being a stay-at-home mother to seeking employment outside and working alongside other driven, intelligent minds towards a common goal.

For the last one and a half years, I've gone back and forth on this. Opposing questions of the same kind bump into each other in my head.

Should I call it quits on my writing and indie publishing venture? It's certainly not a commercial success. I've come to realize that I'd enjoy writing fiction far more as a hobby. I love blogging too, in fact!

What would it be like to start sending out applications in response to job postings? Do my qualifications and experience still matter? Will prospective employers see the value in them?

Why can't I be grateful for what I have?

Do we really need more money?

Isn't it awesome that I'm around for D when he needs me? And look, he's growing up to be such a large-hearted child, without any sense of entitlement!

Is it awful that I want something more than this? I'd like to go out into the world and work on something meaningful that makes a difference to people's lives.

Yes, yes, I currently make a huge difference in my child's life, and it's a very important role to play, it's a connection that I consider sacred and a privilege.

Yet... is it wrong to want more? To want something different?

Like Maya in Aja Gabel's Lightbreakers wonders: What did she want? To know what to want, how to want it?

And then it occurred to me that what I was afraid of was not the wanting itself, but the disappointment that would arise when the desire is not fulfilled in ways I've envisaged or within the timeframe I want. Like, yesterday!

Which means ...

Desire was not the root cause of suffering in my life. What kept me from having a healthy relationship with desire was my fear that I wouldn't be able to handle any disappointment or doubt that came after.

The disappointment that arises if a desire is not fulfilled. The disappointment or doubt that arises if a desire is fulfilled but comes at a price.

The disappointment that arises if when reality doesn't unfold in a way that exactly matches the fantasy in my head.

Essentially, the disappointment that arises when life doesn't go my way.

I worried that that disappointment would leave me wrecked — the way postpartum depression did — and unable to cope with the demands of a different, unfamiliar life.

Until I realized that I'm actually selling myself short. That I have far more courage than I give myself credit for. That I've grown tremendously in all these years.

And I can now see how I've grown with each struggle and meandering into becoming the person I am today —

someone with a clearer understanding of what truly matters to her,

someone able to try out new things and accept the failures and successes that come or don't,

someone who's now able to see life as a series of experiences rather than as a judgement on her capabilities and worth.

This is what I'm holding in my heart now —

the disappointment that my fiction writing venture didn't turn out the way I had hoped it would,

the realization that I love writing as a hobby and as a pursuit in itself, not as a means to an end,

the appreciation that pursuing a path in self-publishing helped me grow as a human being, motivated me to learn many things on my own, and also enjoy a lot of time to hang out with D — there was a lot of value in this path even if it didn't become the commercial success I had hoped it would be,

and a desire to explore what returning to work life would look like for me.

And the amazing thing is that now I'm able to make space for all of these without turning the events of my life into some kind of judgement about my abilities or intelligence.

This is just the story of an ordinary human being learning to show up in life, on a daily basis, with utmost compassion, courage and curiosity.

Compassion for what came before, courage to accept and face what's here and now, and curiosity for what the future holds.

So ...

I don't know about you but the most gangsta thing I've ever done in my life is learning how to bear emotional pain so that the fear of disappointment doesn't keep me from wanting more out of my life and going after it.