To Want What You Already Have
“Type-A personalities have goal pursuit as default hardwiring. This is excellent for producing achievement, but also anxiety, as you’re constantly future-focused. I’ve personally decided that achievement is no more than a passing grade in life. It’s a C+ that gets you limping along to the next grade. For anything more, and certainly for anything approaching happiness, you have to want what you already have.”
Last week, I was in New York visiting my daughter. The first few days were great as the city’s energy buoyed me. I would walk for hours, wandering through skyscrapers and enjoying the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. I ate good food, didn’t have great coffee (I never do in the USA), and marvelled at the oddity of it all.
But then, on the fourth day, I started feeling anxious and depleted. I felt as if my soul was slowly leaving me. It told me it would go to sleep until I could awaken it. It said, you know I’m not the one for bright lights, big city. My energy levels went down, and I got a cold and felt miserable.
I could not cope with the general scrambling: restaurant bookings, museum lines, choosing broadway seats, standing in queues for a cupcake, and anything else I wanted to buy. Then there was the constricted space, the suffocation I felt whether in my hotel room, lobby, or restaurant or just out in the busyness of the city.
New York is a beautiful city for aspiring and desiring 20–30-year-olds. But not for me. Not for someone who is in midlife and seeks quiet, inner peace and mindfulness. Not for someone leaving the striving behind and moving on to the second part of his life, that of acceptance.
When I started thinking and writing, inner peace and not chasing achievement would lead to happiness. And that moving towards acceptance and loving what you already have is the start of our journey to be happier. I got a lot of pushback from many around me. Worse, I started to doubt my thoughts.
So, Ferriss, the author of the seminal book The 4-hour Workweek, affirmed my thoughts when he said that wanting what you already have is the way to happiness.
If the Guru of productivity and achievement was tired of striving, then surely all of us must.
Over the past decade or so, during my midlife renaissance, I’ve found that the contentment I seek starts only when I stop striving for things that don’t really matter to me. When I stop rushing around like a headless chicken or when I stop giving a shit about what others think of me.
It all looks simple enough in my journal. It’s also quite doable when I’m in my comfort zone and during the first few magical morning hours. But it is much more complicated when life slowly takes over from the morning and starts directing you like how New York’s energy overwhelmed me.
However, to want what you have also means that we are crystal clear in what we have in the first place.
Twentieth-century French anthropologist René Girard said, “We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths. But if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.”
What if our desires were not ours — not something that was under our control or something we manufactured? Instead, desire was a social process — it was mimetic. In other words, we want what other people want — This assumption that our desires are all our own and the stories we tell ourselves is what Gerard calls “The Romantic Lie.”
What makes it worse is that we are not always aware that our mimetic desires run below our conscious thoughts and that they rule our thinking and goal-setting. We become concerned with what Girard calls the metaphysical desire: the desire of another’s desire and not the object itself.
Only when we listen to the music of our soul’s whispers can we know what we want. Only when we are satisfied that our longings are right for us can we proceed to the next step of acceptance or wanting what we have.
There is a thin line between doing nothing and being nothing. Between living true to yourself and being passive, allowing life and others to direct you.
There are often bigger themes that we can’t control, but we can’t deny that we all wish to co-create our lives instead of waiting on others or divine intervention.
Oprah Winfrey accepted that she didn’t have the energy or the desire to continue being the world’s biggest TV talk show star and instead settled on moving away from the limelight but still doing what she wanted: running OWN, her recently launched television network. She was not being nothing but doing more of what she loved and less of what didn’t interest her anymore.
This week, I’m staying with my ailing father in the south of Lebanon, where I’m away from work and its pressures, staying in a serene villa with help around me and secluded from the outer world — the kind of break I’d prescribe for myself if I were coaching me.
I know I want that quiet. I know I want to sit on a verandah overlooking the garden with a chilled wind striking my face and neck, smoking a cigar and writing.
During this week, I’ve decided to do nothing. I rise early, read, journal and write. I walk daily and go to the gym. I do some work in the afternoon, but it’s all very casual.
Here, there is no need for action or their impending reactions. No judgements and conclusions. No desiring and striving. When there is no wanting, then there is both quiet and happiness.
During those magical morning hours, I can feel my soul sit beside me, converse and even laugh with me. I definitely want what I have right now: a blueprint for how I want to live my life.
I know I’m in a privileged position to be able to do so. However, we can all design our lives to be what we want if we stop being on that hamster wheel.
“ Most talk is just noise. The English word “noise” comes from “nausea”. Say nothing unless it must be said. People will appreciate your silence and know that when you speak, it must be important. Shallow rivers are noisy. Deep lakes are silent. Silence is precious.” — Derek Sivers.
This quiet is a stark contrast to my stay in New York or even when I’m back home and inundated with work, family and society, where I get sucked into the life of striving and running. And that’s when I become annoying, self-centred and miserable.
Now, my challenge is to design my present life with what I want to have when I’m actually in the arena with the pressures of my business, family, and societal life. How can I find that inner peace and yet remain effective? How can I be accepting yet strive for the elements I want?
First, I must clarify all the things that I really want to have.
Wisdom comes from removing the junk, falsehoods, and impediments to clear thinking. Less business, more writing. Less spending, more saving. Less internet and social media, more reading fiction and poetry. Less distractedness and more noticing.
Then, with a less cluttered and more tranquil mind, I can start to want and love what I have.