All I want are socks and books. Honestly.
There's not much more I concretely desire: I have loving people around me and some work that I enjoy, and assorted goals and events to look forward to in my future. But I was told the other day I have to at least open something on Christmas with the family. So I asked for some socks. And a book or two.
I write so much about emptiness, and about retrieving lost things. It's circuitous. I expect to arrive at newfound conclusions or develop new clarity when the truth has been sitting patiently next to me all along. There is enough. I have small things in extraordinary abundance.
"You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. There is no more."
If you occupy the same spaces as me, you likely have a default state of longing desire, and incremental improvement. Your best friend is a conveyor belt machine of hedonic proportions. There is always a prize just out of reach; you're three years old and there's a marshmallow up on a table, many birthdays from your grasp. One day you do succeed to grab it, you eat it, it's delicious, and then?
The feeling passes.
It's how I've operated for so long — I've done this, now on to the next thing. No time to dwell. No time to celebrate. Quickly my search escalates to vague, hazy ideals beyond possessions, into a realm of meaning and purpose that remains difficult to define. But the premise is the same: I'm still looking. I don't have enough. Look, there is yet another faint speck, a glimmering light in the distance. It should be mine.
Perhaps rather than looking for something lost wherever we go, we should be more selective. We should say for once, there is enough noise. I have enough. Sometimes peace is better than being right.
Still: I have conditioned myself to think in violent binary and believe there is a clear, objective win or loss in all decisions I make. If I don't stick with something, that is failure. Getting anything less than a few, ambitious outcomes? Also failure. While I continue to value my days as a function of my productive output, I understand I must be more forgiving with myself. Acquiring an obsession for a new hobby and telling all my friends and then dropping it altogether a week later is normal. Equally okay is ignoring a deadline for a month and then working furiously through the creeping dawn to cobble together an imperfect final result. So many ideas have indoctrinated us through bureaucracy and systematic churning to believe that we are overclocked machines that must push and produce, push and produce; you feel there is something faintly wrong, but not wrong enough for you to stop. One day, something breaks.
It's important to have that sense of urgency at times. But clutching to your chest an obligation to maximize a number of successes — pleasure, income, optionality — is dangerously intoxicating. And truthfully, the process of subsuming myself into this tunnel-visioned view has also made me feel constricted, suffocated as I dove deeper into Sisphyean tasks. I want to believe in new metaphors, like Ava's take on this:
"...What if you perceive life as an open field?"
It's hard to remember the promises we made to ourselves as children. Year after year our inner calls for desire are misinterpreted, lost in the wiretapping transmission of a lifelong game of telephone. New mediums have engulfed sensations of happiness and wonder, diluting them into commodified, pleasure-laden formats like expensive Michelin-star dinners and high-rise glassy walls. Purpose has mutated into branding, nominal fame, exclusive fellowships, technocratic trailblazing.
It's time to return to the basics lol:
It felt better, no, not just felt better — it meant more, more than anything I have ever won or earned, to go on a two-hour lamplit walk in amber with you. I would pay an unimaginable price to relive the past. To drink peach and plum to a warm buzz and haphazardly press dumplings together in a cramped kitchen for five, to blindly point out constellations and recount stories while fireside. These are not proxies, nor placeholders: just peculiar mundane contentments magnified in retrospect that leave me convinced this is the purest way to live. Love's strange power is to free the shackled mind, to have the ropes on your hands untied.
The most influential moments in my life have simultaneously been the most illegible. That's why it's important for us to stay together, even if that means endless boxes of socks in my future. All desire can be a means to help you forget, but only the right ones can make you whole.