From the time we’re very young, we’re conditioned to be strivers. We’re trained to want and keep wanting for more and better. Better versions of ourselves and better experiences for ourselves. This is where we’re supposed to aim our attention.
Truth be told, when confronted with these kinds of broad, future-oriented questions, I often find myself blank, unable to identify what I want for my future in any real detail. I usually use magic markers and glitter to make a picture for my daughter. It’s not to say there aren’t things I want to do and create: I want to spend more time in the desert, I want to build my speaking business, and I want to do more silent retreats. But mostly what I feel in the face of these five-year-plan questions is a big fat “should” with a sprinkle of confusion and a splash of fogginess. The strong sense is that I should have a clear plan and an overarching vision of the future. And that there’s something wrong if I don’t, or don’t even want to participate in the exercise.
But then I remember: We take our progress-oriented, “more and better” mindset and apply it to ourselves and our time on the planet. We relate to ourselves as an object in our model of unending progress. We focus on the future, where we want to get to, what else there could be, and what we are aiming for. At the end of the day, we assume that wanting means wanting for something—or more specifically, something else, something external, and something new and different.
After years of asking myself these sorts of well-intentioned questions, I discovered that they’re not the right questions for me or for many of my clients. The question “What do you want?”—while wonderfully helpful in some ways—can become another demand on us, another thing we’re supposed to accomplish, another bar to reach. We’re supposed to have a to-do list for our future and a plan to get there, and if we don’t, we’re certain to miss out on that future of our dreams.
After thousands of workshops and too many hours spent journaling, talking, meditating, singing, and every other “-ings,” I realized that what I really want is to get to be here. That is, to experience this moment, this—dare I say—ordinary moment. To experience it as enough. The intention I hold is to stop trying to get to somewhere else.
But what’s remarkable is that when we enter this present moment fully, dive completely into now, with no next, and nowhere else to get to, we discover that time feels more like a vertical experience than a horizontal one. With each now, we drop into a kind of vertical infinity that is its own destination.
After diligently searching for an impressive “want” that would warrant a giant poster board and bright green sparkles, I discovered that what I want is far simpler than what I thought I should want. What I want is to be completely where I am, and to stop having to want something else all the time. I want for this moment to be everything, whatever it is. Furthermore, I want to feel a more consistent sense of awe for the fact that I get to be here at all.
I offer my own experience here so that you may know of an alternative to the habitual striving and wanting that we’re encouraged to participate in. But please, if these sorts of intentional inquiries are useful, if they help you gain clarity and move the dial forward in your life, then use them without hesitation. But if you find yourself feeling blank when asked about what you want to be, become, or achieve, then perhaps you can give yourself permission to stop striving to get somewhere better and strive to just be here.
