Longing Is My Middle Name
Sometimes the experience of longing is general, without pointing to a specific–concrete or abstract–object being missed. At times, it takes the shape of loneliness, and feels like an emotional heartburn. It is as though I were spinning wheels when I didn’t even know that I was trying to move, longing being motion itself.
Often, at the heart of longing is a somewhat unconscious process with more or less obvious, or even apparently hidden, symptoms… In a recent conversation with a new good friend, I told him of my suspicion: that when we feel stuck for no clear reason, or can’t seem to be able to make a choice, there’s likely a secondary process taking place in our unconscious that is hijacking most of our energy.
I have dwelt on this idea for a few decades. Depression, with its massive energetic draw, is like an atomic version of this unconscious process at the center of experience. But there are other, milder ones that frequently knock at our basement door and often go unnoticed… We usually blame our behavioral habits and distractions for the time and energy that is wasted in our lives, when in reality, they are just an avoidant response to an inner longing. Longing for what? Asking the question is answering the knock. Personally, the way I frame the question is: “What do I need right now?”
We have a multitude of wants, mostly probably driven by our unacknowledged and unmet real needs. But needs, not wants, are at the center of behavior, and our ability to first recognize, and second to move toward meeting them, is what gives the real quality of our lives. Meeting wants is ephemeral, and throws fuel in the fire; meeting needs turns the fire into warmth, and there I nest.
Understanding a need can sometimes be like an earth-shattering realization, but not necessarily. It can be as simple as understanding that I’ve gone too long without a glass of water, or that I just need two minutes of quiet inactivity to recenter. Frequently catering to our deepest, simplest needs reverts a sense of personal disconnection.
I remember the first time that longing was expressed as romantic love. I was eight, and I still know, as if it were today, how I felt. At that moment, I simultaneously knew longing and how it felt to have the longing met. Think about it: can you miss something that you have never experienced before? (Interesting implications for the pursuit of the Divine…)
Years before knowing the physical expression of love, I already new, in my body, what it was like to long for the feminine embrace.
In the last few days, this is the very longing that I have felt. I miss dancing with the feminine. I hear music that prompts me to stand up and start moving, and recognize how much my body wants to share this dance. There is music and there is the desire to dance, but I am alone in the Milonga.
I have been alone before, many times. But it’s the first time that I am alone and in my fifties. Whether I am old or not, depends on who is looking. I continue feeling like myself, and despite a sense of agelessness, I still notice incremental changes in the mirror. I am now, very likely, a little more invisible to onlooking potential partners. At least this is what we, above our 40’s, tell ourselves sometimes.
But whether at 50 or 100, looking like a tambourine or a pre-historic dragon, now, or on the day that will be my last, I know my own hunger for life. And naked, with or without clothes on my body, I say no! Romantic love will never be over for me.
In Portland, at the end of August, for the first Ketamine treatment session. Copyright Ciro Coelho/InwardRide.com.