I’ll Tell You What I Want, What I Really Really Want

I’ll Tell You What I Want, What I Really Really Want

I know I’ve been going on about this, but, my dear, it’s so important.

What do you want?

Until you know what you want, getting it will be really hard. Imagine going to the grocery store if you don’t know what you want.

“Eehh, I don’t really want fruit or veg. Yeah, I don’t want soup. No, chicken’s not really right. Maybe something salty No, not chips, no, not pretzels, not nuts. Maybe something sweet. No, not chocolate, not Swedish Fish, not gum. Oh, I just don’t know.”

You could spend the whole day decided that each thing you look at isn’t what you want. You would get hungrier and hungrier. You could reject and reject and reject until you are so wiped out that you don’t really have any idea of what you want. Your heart’s desire could land in your lap, and, just from habit, you would say, “I don’t want that.”

Well, we kind of do that. A lot. I don’t know what kind of job I want. I don’t know what kind of house I want. I don’t know what sort of changes I want to make in my relationship, my feelings, my habits, my attitudes, my beliefs. By not knowing what we want, we feel like we are always pushing life away, even if we don’t know that’s the icky feeling we have.

We are practicing something all the time, the same way we are all committed to something. The question is, what are we practicing? To what am I committed? Am I practicing “don’t want this?” Am I committed to living a life that is hard and painful? Am I practicing uplifting or feeling down?

What do you want?

I used to think that I didn’t know. And my teacher would say over and over and over, “You do know.”

Turned out that she was right. Sometimes, I didn’t want to know because I was scared about having to change something to get what I wanted. Sometimes I didn’t go for it because I thought I might fail. I had all sorts of ideas about how not to get what I wanted.

And so, I started to practice thinking about what I did want. It meant going inside, and getting to know me. It meant peeking into emotional closets, and going down into my emotional basement. It meant cleaning out a lot of emotional junk; old traumas, left-over crises, old hurts and betrayals. That took some effort. But oh, my, is it nice to have cleared all that out. Oh, my, does it make room for nice stuff.

I need to make a few minutes on a regular basis to consider what I do want. Thinking about what I do want helps me find it. I think about what I do want when I go to the grocery store. I find that when I have decided, I don’t do much impulse buying. I think about what I do want for clothes, and hardly ever end up with something that sits in the closet unworn.

By taking the time to respect my true wishes, I am respecting me. I am cutting out a lot of fiddling around, wasting time, and money, and energy, and I end up feeling like my life is full of really nice stuff, activities, events, and people.

How have I changed from pretending I don’t know to acting on my heart’s desires?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 07092013