Warm Wanting - learning from others…
Many of us find it hard to imagine our needs or wants can be a happy thing; we struggle to trust that they might ever be responded to in a way that matters. If we are to restore our abilities to want and to rely, we need to alter our associations with wanting: to embrace its goodness, to understand its essential buoyancy - to begin to experience wanting as a gift and a creative offering rather than a burden or imposition.
Many of us who struggle to believe in the goodness and beauty of our needs and wants have bleak histories in this dimension. The disappointing, painful ‘failures’ or rejections of our early needs have left us associating wanting with hurt, impotence and despair.
This leaves us inclined to suppress or reject the parts of us that need and hope. Resignation feels wiser. We don’t expect much; we learn not to express our longings; we ‘know’ them to be an irritant. In time, we may come to associate wanting with immaturity, ‘neediness’ or selfishness. We may even find relief in judging those who express their wants or allow themselves to depend.
‘It is possible for us to join this more generous co-created world…’
Yet our lives would feel warmer and happier if we knew how to join them. It is possible for us to join this more generous co-created world: to learn that our wanting can be potent, can be beautiful, can be a dignified and delightful source of joy. Unbelievably - to us - that it can be welcome.
Nonetheless, for as long as our wanting carries the bleak despair of our histories, neither ourselves nor others will easily experience our wanting as uplifting. Instead, our conflicted, hurt and despair will colour the tone of our adult requests: We may find ourselves bewildered by how consistently the world seems to reject us in our need; in awe of how wrong things can go; of how irrelevant our needs seem to be; of how unwilling the world seems to be to rise to meet us.
As a natural response, many of us who disavow our own need and wanting develop a binary view of the universe in which we are destined to be neglected, while we envy (and often serve) the ‘chosen’, luckier ones. This bleak perspective serves to cement our hopelessness, our sense of a universe stacked against us…
All of us have known people with a lovely, heart-warming capacity to want.
I want to propose a different response - that we learn to see these ‘lucky’ ones as our teachers and guides, offering a reflection of how harmonious want can be. Granted, not all wanting is attractive or beautiful. But some is: All of us have known people with a lovely, pro-social capacity to want. Their enthusiasm is infectious, their agendas are collective; it is hard to resist their projects. I will call these humans ‘warm wanters’ - those who enrich and enliven the world by bringing forth their happy hope.
If we pay attention to the arc of their wanting - how they express want relationally and how it unfolds for them - what do we see? When these ‘warm’ wanters bring forth a wish to others, they tend project an easygoing, enthusiastic, wide-eyed radiance. I would say the energy in their wanting is close to love - maybe it is love? -; their eyes are lit up with an inner vision of the thing they wish to call into being; they radiate with a love of that thing.
‘It often seduces us, because it offers us a warm wave to surf ‘
In such humans, wanting is clearly not an ugly energy, it is a hopeful gesture to a responsive world. It is not demanding or selfish or contracted, it is a creative, heart-warming invitation. It often seduces us, because it offers us a warm wave to surf - a wave that will unfold into partaking of their expansion, relaxation, and delight, when they sense the world respond to them.
I think of the hopeful social beauty and energy my two-year old nephew brings to his little projects and hopes. Captivated by a wish, he leans into contact with a warm, pleading seduction. He makes it delightful to respond to him: to intuit what he is trying to reach for, to co-create its fulfillment with him. His offering his want feels flattering; it is an invitation to closeness, to collaboration, to creation, and, yes, to surrender, to becoming one with the emerging moment.
As I flesh out this map of ‘warm wanting’, I sense its essential goodness. I feel, in my cells, the knowledge of the loveliness of wanting, and this helps me to re-envisage want - supporting its release from the fraught defensiveness of early defeat. I want to begin to believe in it more, to support its life. It seems some of us might challenge our inner ‘attack’ on wanting, and take in this goodness. Allowing those who want beautifully, to be our teachers and not our nemesis.