According to Buddhism, desire is the cause of all suffering. According to Catholicism, Lustful and gluttonous desires should be suppressed. According to capitalist doctrine our desires should be satisfied by our purchases. According to the Pizza hut commercial the object of our desires (ostensibly the pizza) should be ignored and we should merely focus on the desired outcome: To become un-hungry. Buddha, Pope Benedict, Adam Smith and the pizza delivery boy are all unanimous in proclaiming that desire is something to be avoided.
What a crock.
Feeling full, post-coital bliss, transcendence, standing on the summit, the end of an adventure, hugging your child after being away from home, finally getting your shaking hands on that beautiful iphone........ These are all fine feelings. I bare them no grudge but right now I want to stand up and flip the bird at both the federal reserve and the banyan tree and say that desire is the first thing we are born with and the last thing that leaves us when we die and it is a thing to be savored and enjoyed.
Think of what it means to lack desire: to not look at your lover with passion, to smell fresh-baked bread in the morning and not want to smother it in butter and rip it with your teeth, to see a blue ocean and not want to dive in, to see a gorgeous baby and not want to hold it, to find a great book and not want to open it. The only people who feel this way are those who are dying or significantly dead inside. I have watched elderly people successively lose one desire after another and it is the one sure sign that they are going to be leaving soon.
The problem is that most people have been socialized to think that hunger should be sated, orgasms attained, and products pocketed in the minimum amount of time possible without ever stopping to feel how good it feels to really want something. Our cultural innovation has been to shorten the cycles of desire and gratification so that they are indistinguishable.
People go into debt to shorten the period of desire and lovers become heartbroken when their desires are not immediately reciprocated. I want to focus on the latter point for a moment.
How many times have you heard someone tell you how painful it is to be attracted to someone but he/she doesn't feel the same way? How privileged this person is to be able to look at someone and be attracted to everything about them, to desire to touch and be with this person in every moment.
So kids, savor your desires 'k? You've gotta live with them for the rest of your days and without them you'd be a sad lump of homogenous nothing. (can you tell that I suddenly got tired?)
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