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Saturday, May 15, 2010

Wanting What you Have is the Same as Gratitude

Yesterday I was talking about wanting as, perhaps, the antithesis of despair. This morning I had only a tinge of depression kind of like a stain left over from yesterday which hid in the brain shadows and ventured out. ZAP! It was easily dispelled with a moment or two of "1,2,3,4 who are we for" exercise. Then, before I got up, I lay in bed a few minutes and thought a bit about wanting. Maybe it was, indeed, a possible mood changer to think about wanting something.

Then I realized that it was important to want something you already have, rather than wanting something you don't have. Wanting something you don't have is a bit stressful. Wanting, or desire, as a kind of fear to get you going is a bit different. It's okay to want something you don't have in order to put a fire under yourself to strive to do better to attains your goal. And it's good to have goals. But wanting what you already have is a gratitude that puts you in a nice place to start the day and wouldn't be a bad thing to think about more often.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for writing this, A.B.

Could we even go so far as to say that "wanting what we have" is the "secret" to happiness? I think so, but need to remind myself that wanting what I have is a process, (& a continual one) not a destination. Some days (some moments!) I'm better at "doing contment" than others.

Aren't we cajoled by the media & our culture into wanting something more, different, "better" all the time?

We can choose to swim against the tide and cultivate the mindset of "wanting what we have" with discipline. Isn't it another habit of thought, of how we choose to look at things & our lives?

A. .B. Curtiss said...

The real secret to happiness is to understand that you already have it. You can't go out and get it. You can't even give it to yourself. It is your essential nature. The problem is that our essential okayness is covered over by fear and to alleviate the fear we think we have to "make ourselves happy." We don't. We just have to address our repressed fear and our basic nature will reveal itself.

What you are doing with meditaions such as "wanting what you have," is that you are getting your brain to build more productive neurons to use instead of the depressive and anxious neurons that keep you agitated and unable to handle your everyday stress. Once you have stabilized yourself in some degree of sanity, you can proceed to handle your repressed fear
A. B. Curtiss