what you were taught to want

Oct 1

Dear Reader,

When I ask people what they want out of the next few years, the answers tend to come quickly and sound a lot like each other, usually some version of moving up at work or a bigger house. When I ask about the best ordinary day they've had recently, the answers slow down and get oddly specific. Someone talks about a Saturday morning when nobody needed anything from them and they sat outside with their coffee until it went cold. Someone else describes an afternoon spent fixing a fence with their brother.

The two lists rarely seem to have much to do with each other. I used to think that was simply the difference between goals and pleasures, and maybe some of it is. But I've come to suspect that the first list was largely handed to us, and the second is closer to what we actually want, and that somewhere along the way we learned to treat the second one as too small to count.

Part of what makes the taught wants so persuasive is that they're easy to announce. Other people understand them immediately and can be glad for you. The things we genuinely want often feel too small or too particular to bother telling anyone about, and it's hard to imagine someone congratulating you on a slow Saturday morning.

There's often a bit of embarrassment in how people admit to them, too. They'll describe the slow Saturday morning and then add something like, I know that's not much, as though they've confessed to a lack of ambition. That little apology is worth paying attention to. It suggests we learned early which wants were respectable, and the ones that didn't qualify got moved quietly to the side.

I don't think the answer is to throw out the bigger goals. Some of them are genuinely ours, and many were handed to us by people who loved us and wanted good things for us. It might just be worth giving the smaller list a little more standing than we usually do, since it may be the more honest record of what we've wanted all along.

Yours in the journey,