Hope and Desire

Desire fulfilled seems to be more pleasurable than a disappointment avoided.

Disappointment experienced seems to be more painful than the lack of desire.

Pain and pleasure, I've heard, are two sides to the same coin. They are the positive and negative expression of sensation, of feeling.

As I've been sorting through a lot of things lately, I'm discovered that, for whatever reason, I've developed the habit of viewing life through the same lens as Vince Vaughn's character, Peter La Fleur, did at the beginning of the movie Dodgeball. He said,

"I found that if you have a goal, that you might not reach it. But if you don't have one, then you are never disappointed. And I gotta tell ya... it feels phenomenal."

It's a humorous spot in the movie, some of us relating to that mindset. But the reality of living that way is that it doesn't feel phenomenal. It doesn't cause much feeling at all. We resort to that way of thinking specifically so we don't feel, because like I referred to before, pain and pleasure are just two sides to the same coin. We can't avoid pain without cutting ourselves off from pleasure.

Some would argue that a lot of people use pleasure to numb pain. To some degree, that appears to work on the surface of things, and many people function in that mode, but that's just it. They are merely functioning. There's a wholeness that is involved in finding healthy pleasure in things. They might be masking pain, with the use of something that appears pleasurable, but it isn't an open-eyed pleasure. The instant-gratification employed to ease the current pain looks like pleasure wins out, but the reality of the situation as a whole is that most "pleasurable" behaviors that people resort to in order to numb pain tend to cause more pain to themselves and others down the road, as most of those lesser, immediate pleasures lead to addictions...

So, despite that argument, it still seems clear to me that, when we avoid pain, we intrinsically limit our ability to experience deep, lasting pleasure. And, I have unknowingly allowed myself to operate in this way. Whether it was not trying out for the baseball team in college, for fear of wanting to be on the team but potentially finding out I wasn't good enough, or not speaking up when friends ask where we should go for dinner, a deadly numbness has crept into my heart, attempting to insulate myself from disappointment.

So, acknowledging this is the first step to recovery, I suppose.

I'm not sure how to go about changing. I'd imagine starting small would be helpful. Speaking up when I want to eat somewhere in particular, and then, letting myself feel the disappointment involved if I get out-voted. Or even bigger, pursuing something that will bring me joy and fulfillment, and being willing to work to get there, risking some hard work and potential setbacks and even failure, in the hopes that I will eventually get to experience that joy and fulfillment, etc.

I think our capacity for joy is proportionate to the amount of desire or hope that goes into it. If we are constantly shielding ourselves from disappointment, cynical that the worst will happen anyway, when good things do happen, we are merely slightly surprised and marginally thankful, before slipping into our next bout of cynicism that it will probably be taken away, so don't hope to enjoy it for too long, etc. I think this is a destructive way to live.

And while I don't think it has a death-grip on my personality, I do see that I have not let my heart really experience desire and hope and longing in a long time. I haven't been excited about many things... and it's time for that to change.

I'm not exactly sure how to go about re-orienting the way my heart reacts to desires and what not, but seeing these things is a start.