The Line Between Need and Want...

Want is all consuming, need wavers a bit.  Such a strange paradox, when need is required and want is not.  But wanting is something we seek and direct so much energy to, while needs languish in the corner, wanting.

I am not sure why my needs take a back seat to want.  Why would I not want my needs to be met?  Why would I not seek to meet my own needs, rather than seek out some desperate attempt to get my wants met?  Are wants more easily sated than needs?  Are needs a vulnerability in this life that I would just rather not think about?

Perhaps it is just a matter of laziness.  Wants are easy and never ending.  Whereas needs are much more baseline, required and incessant.  Wants come and go, needs remain steadfast until sufficiently addressed.  Perhaps, I have lived so long with unmet needs I just decided they were unmeetable and so allowed myself to become distracted by the relentless pursuit of want.

And boy have I been wanton in my wanting. While, for the whole of my life, I have acted as if I had no needs, or at least very few.  And I did not need you to meet those needs, no not in the slightest.  I could and would handle that on my own.  However, my wants?  I invited you into that party all the time.  And sometimes you were the object of my desire and my pursuit of you, endless and tireless.

So where is that line between a want and a need?  Lord knows I have not known for most of my life, well, perhaps I haven’t acted like I did.  I think need is something that is required for survival on the emotional, spiritual, physical plane.  Which is where the line blurs...if we are talking purely of physical need the conversation is easier, perhaps.  I need food, water, shelter, contact, safety, purpose.  But I have a lot of opinions about how those needs are met and that is where this whole conversation goes a bit haywire.  We all have differing perspective on what is needed and what is required.  And then when you lay the emotional and spiritual aspects over the physical, it, well at least in my case, has had disastrous results.

I have not been a good decider about a want versus a need.  Still am not in many areas.  I have also struggled with whose job it is to provide either to me.  Is my job needs and yours wants?  Are they both your job?  I have lived as though, for better or worse,  both were totally mine to address, provide and satisfy which has led, at times, to a quite lonely and hard existence.

The truth?  I am still not sure.  When placed juxtaposition to others, I tend to fail the boundary test of me and you.  My edges more permeable and varied.  I have tended to get lost to the shores of others because I have routinely mistaken your needs and wants to be my own, or a perhaps a more honest rendition is that I thought that if I satisfied your wants and needs so tenderly and completely that you would, in turn, want to do the same for me.  That has been an epic failure all round. And quite selfish, really.

Today I remain in the quagmire of baseline needs and swirling wants.  I am still not sure whose responsibility they are and how to go about getting them met.  I know I have few needs and they are basic.  And I know if I am not careful, praying and meditating daily, my wants take off with my life, my peace and all of my money.

I know there is a line between the two and I guess this blog is my owning that I struggle with finding it, and then when I do see it, respecting it.  So much want, so little need.  Perhaps some day I will find a confluence and congruence between the two...perhaps I shall not.  I know that it is my work to mediate the two and never give up living in a manner that, at a very bare minimum, asks the question of why to both and then to sit still long enough to hear the answer that seems to be whispered so faintly at times that without all that stillness and repose, I am assured I will never, ever be able to hear it.

So my life, my quest, my task at hand, is to endeavor, it is to persevere, it is to not give up.  To seek the line, to respect the line and to do the work to always know which side of it I am living on...

Again, still...