|
THE MORNING AFTER HALLOWEEN ...
I picked up a lot of discarded candy on my daily walk. I had anticipated candy wrappers, but not full pieces of candy, dotting the sidewalk like jewels, left behind in the fevered rush to get to the next door.
As I picked them up to drop into my doggy bag, I considered whether it was wasteful to throw away perfectly intact candy, but made a swift decision to categorize it as garbage.
On one of my favorite routes up the hill, a circuitous route home, I often pass a garbage collector who offers to take my doggy bag. I gratefully decline, chuckling about how I never know when my dog is going to poop again. But the truth is, she's a small dog, so I always have room in my bag to collect garbage I find along the way. For some reason, I feel sheepish about telling him that I'm also a garbage collector.
But on this particular Saturday morning, a few minutes after I performed my usual bit with the garbage man, I saw an elder heading up the hill toward me, as I made my way back down. This is a man I recognized from the comings and goings of daily life, someone I've seen before, but don't know personally. Just before we crossed paths, he stopped short and bent to pick up a peanut butter cup, perfectly unruffled in its orange wrapping. Coming closer, thinking of the kind garbage man who always asks after my own portable wastebasket, I asked the man, "Would you like to put that in my garbage bag?"
He briskly responded, "No, I'd like to eat it!" and I laughed with delight as we passed each other by.
This is not a story about how you should eat candy off the street. It's a story about desire.
It strikes me that this moment, and this gentleman, are a model for responding to the instinct of our desires. As children, we learn that suppressing our urges, or withholding our desires, is a sign of maturity. And it certainly can be. But once we reach adulthood, it can also be a way of holding ourselves back, keeping ourselves small, and not fully entering the vivid - and, yes, sometimes frightening and harmful, yet beautiful - world that we live in.
Then comes that old adage, "be careful what you wish for," used as an example of care and healthy caution that also, I believe, misguides us. In the best cases, the wishes being cautioned here are those that come from attempts to force or exert our will on situations beyond our control. Those are wishes made out of fear, anger, jealousy, panic, despair. But the wishes that come from our free will - the part of us that understands implicitly that there are forces at work in the universe that we can't see or touch - those wishes get quieted, or buried, in the process.
I've written before about my experience of wanting, and how important it has been for me to detach what I wish for from any potential outcome. In other words, to practice wishing that is not dependent on receiving, or on fearing disappointment. Wishing as a practice of release, rather than gripping tightly, keeping it secret, believing in some kind of safety above the thing that you're wishing for in the first place. This other kind of wishing is a sacred conversation with the beyond and the unknown, and it involves my youngest selves, my oldest selves, and the version of me right now, hearing the wish in my ear or heart or soul and then speaking it aloud.
The gentleman who inspired me a couple of weeks ago is an older white man, an artist, a sculptor. It might be true that his lived experience means he has an easier relationship with expressing his desire, and acting on it, than most of us. But it's been my experience that wishing is a muscle anyone can strengthen. And that counter to the fear of disappointment - however well informed by past experience - a regular, sacred act of wishing brings you closer to yourself and others, sparking connection that is much stronger than any of the shields or defenses or survival mechanisms that we've picked up along the way.
Wishing With You,
Dor + Tay
|
