On Yearning
Allow yourself to long for something again
To yearn is to long for something so intensely that you get to the point where you feel separated or lost without it. To yearn is to long for something that money cannot buy, that you feel lost without, and yet you always know where you are in relation to it. It is something you feel is missing from you and yet you are missing from it. Yearning is not a solvable equation. Trying to logic through or plan toward what you pine for will only take more time and presence away from what you need to do most. Feel the yearning that you have in your heart and allow it to propel you.
What do you long for most in this world?
There are many things worth longing for. To name a few: Romance, adventure, to re-live a past memory that has faded to time, to spend more time with a loved one, to create a family or children, to experience or fulfill something you feel is missing from your life now but you want in the future, to feel at awe in nature, or to build something not so you will be remembered, but so someone else will get use from it long after you’re gone. These all share the same texture, flavors, and imprints of our soul. You have a yearning and you know what it is, but it’s just out of reach.
I’m writing this because we don’t allow ourselves to yearn anymore. We kid ourselves and say we’re too old, or too slow, or we don’t know enough to fulfill what we yearn for, so what’s the point? We tell ourselves this not because it’s true, but because it keeps us safe. We don’t want to be wrong, because to be wrong means we have to experience the tortuous gamut of emotions involved in the pursuit of our dreams and risk the possibility of failure. It would be easier if we just avoided yearning for anything at all in the first place. To avoid yearning is to avoid pain.
There are different kinds of pain. Pain is often thought of in the physical sense (if I twist my ankle), or in the emotional sense (if I am dissatisfied with my life or if someone treats me poorly). To me, yearning is pain produced from the soul.
People so often talk about using numbing mechanisms to dilute the tension of pain in our lives (via social media, alcohol, drugs, gossip, news, politics, entertainment, etc.), but quietly and without fully realizing it, we are also numbing our yearning. I get it, if we allow ourselves to feel the depths of our yearning (especially if we’ve never felt it before), the feeling can be too powerful so we numb to desensitize the cries of our soul. We deaden our yearning with anything so we don’t have to feel the fabric of our dreams.
But the pain from yearning is a general good. To yearn for something honest, true, and beautiful to you is divine. The absence of what you yearn for requires you to have presence with what you have now. It requires you to drop any trait that does not reflect your highest potential, excavate your greatest unique gifts, and channel them toward the direction of your dreams. Allowing yourself to feel yearning is a fuel to get you closer every day to what you yearn for. If you numb the pain of yearning, you also suppress your unique gifts required to satisfy your longing; but by feeling the yearning and allowing it to drive you, your entire center of gravity will shift and allow you to show up in the ways you need to in order to get to where you must go.
I’m sharing this with you in an effort to flesh out what I truly yearn for, because the whole purpose of this site is for me to experience my journey through life and share what I find with you here. I normally try to think or plan ‘How can I get to xyz’, but the how isn’t important. This is purely what I yearn for most, from the heart. I have no idea if I’ll ever experience these, but I can sit in the yearning for them, knowing they will automatically align me to where I need to go.
I yearn for full control over my time
I’m fortunate to live in the U.S. where we have a right to freedom of speech and religion. But what of freedom of time? This is only the third calendar year since 1997 that I’ve not been in school in some capacity. While I’m tremendously grateful for my job and the education I’ve received and earned over the years, there is something more that I am missing.
I’ve organized my entire life so far around being able to buy some years of freedom within the next decade. While I don’t regret organizing my life in this way, it did require me to sacrifice earlier years of my life to get to where I am now. I do not intend to make that same mistake again.
I yearn to fill my days making memories with those I love and doing what fulfills me most on my own time. I find that I spend most of my time daydreaming about creating and building something beautiful for the sake of it, but I fear I don’t have enough time to allow this creativity to compound unimpeded. At least not yet, but all in good time.
I yearn for a deep connection to beloved community
I long for a group of lifelong friends. You know, the kind you want to share a wonderful meal, conversation, and good wine with. Friends that you can build and create with. Friends that you can invite to Thanksgiving or Christmas if they’re all alone on the holiday. A group of friends that I can support and watch grow through their lives and vice versa.
I yearn for a devotion to craft
If nothing else, something to channel my essence into. I want to study at the knee of the greats and master a craft. It appears that writing could be this craft and I owe it to myself to commit to it in order to find out. I will throw my full weight behind writing because I thoroughly enjoy it. I’m curious to see what the muses bring out of me and I want to see what I can do if I give all of myself to something.
I yearn for a sacred place that I can call Home
Above all, I yearn for a place in the world that I belong. This is a place that I know like the back of my hand, and that feels from the very beginning, like Home. I’ve always thought that Home, or the sense of it, was a place you found somewhere out there in the world. And maybe it is. As I get older though, I wonder if you (along with the people you love) create that sense of Home. Home is, I think, something both found and created.
I want to purchase a decent amount of land and build a large home there, not out of greed, but a place where I can host my family, friends, and their children for many years. A place of nourishment, a place to learn, a place of ‘Communitas’ where people can come for celebration, experience transitions or holidays, or shelter from the world.
What I’m asking of myself and of you, dear reader, is that you allow yourself to yearn again. Fully feel that ache of longing. Feel it with every fiber of your being and allow that yearning to come through your fingertips like a magic spell in every action that you take. Don’t suppress the flame in your heart, allow it to ignite into a brilliant white-hot blazing inferno. Feel what your soul is telling you and bring it alive into the world instead of suppressing it. In return, it will bring alive in you what you’ve always felt separated from.
Your longing will turn into belonging.
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"We deaden our yearning with anything so we don’t have to feel the fabric of our dreams."
Oh wow. What a lovely piece!