The End of Longing
Have you ever really been happy with everything? Or like me have you carried around a deep longing that sits on your back like an old nag in a brothers Grimm yarn. That annoying missing feeling you get when you’ve forgotten something critical at home (keys, phone etc) but you can’t remember what it is, but in this case a chunk of your life that’s supposed to be there, but hasn’t yet arrived.
Marketers might label my feeling ‘aspiration,’ but the pictures my longing conjures aren’t of hotties in shimmering dresses on the brink of orgasm as I pump my Lambo’s peddle, the images I see are breezy moments, situations that indulge in a dream of everything having been fixed and put to bed, leaving only life to live, to drink in.
So where to look if the trappings of aspiration aren’t the fix and the solution isn’t a thing I can buy in a showroom or as I pass through Dubai airport? Therapy’s an answer perhaps. Massaging through those stubborn knotty demons that are never satisfied to create a new happy whole, content where it is and where it’s going. But what if that longing’s there for a reason? If a sign tells you Glasgow’s 100 miles away, if you stop for a fag and a packed lunch at 50 and decide to stay put, you’re never going to see it and maybe realise it’s the place to spend the rest of your life.
Longing’s like a key it seems by familiar fables of love and desire. Our lives are a series of trials, errors and explorations, each one an attempt to find a fit, a reassuring click that tells us we’re in the right place, doing the right thing, in the right company.
The democratisation of prosperity has provided an individual autonomy that has let a entire generation run around putting their keys in lots of different shaped locks until they’ve found their partner, style, voice and vocation. Men try being women and sometimes make it permanent because it’s more “them,” Durham corner-shopkeepers resettle on remote desert islands and teach kids to fish, children divorce their parents, attractive careers are jettisoned for humble alternatives that fit someone’s life like a glove tailored from fine Lycra.
Just as with this recent shared prosperity, the web has democratised and hugely accelerated this tasting, sampling, testing of ourselves against the contours of the huge jigsaw. In the old days being a freak, or a nerd was a luxury, now it’s the de-facto position, as we’re now all entitled to be whoever we discover at our core, whether that’s a trainspotter, murderer or rare nature sound LP collector. The web’s letting us try infinite selves and test as many realities against them.
A girl I know met her boyfriend on chatroulette. I’m not surprised. We’ve architected a stupid world that makes it hard to be yourself and to have any chance of meeting your mate. Random’s geometry is a far better tool to recognise that destiny and our constructed ideals are stinky farting bedfellows. Experimentation is more scientific and productive if you remove the variables, in this case all the rules we’ve blindly bought in to.
If the notion of “the one” is true as a template for our love ambitions, our search for “the other one” that lives in our own skin has just got a lot bigger, better, faster and free-er. And as we all know from fairy tales finding the one precedes living happily every after. In other words the end of longing. But I suspect it’s not going to be that easy. Sorry ; )
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(a piece I wrote for Mind Tonic)