All I want

Want is such a tricky concept. It can lead to great things. Like vaccines or medical treatments from ambitious, smart people who want to find cures for the disease they saw destroying family members or friends. Or to the grand experiment of democratic republics from those who saw life under a monarchy and wanted something better.

But it can also be a destructive force. On some simplistic, basic level, isn't addiction a form of wanting? Wanting Helen led to a war. People can bankrupt themselves with wanting. Wanting bigger houses, brighter jewelry, procedures that will keep them young. People can make themselves crazy, break their own hearts every day, with wanting things out of their reach. When applied carelessly, want can be the most painful emotion out there.

What I want most for this new year is, quite simply, to stop wanting. Want has not been my friend of late. I have not felt the good kind of want, the kind that can make a person push herself or leave her comfort zone. No, I've been stuck with the futile wanting of something that is out of my grasp. And the further removed I am, the more desperately I want it. I never knew it was possible to miss a person this much. (And missing a living person is so very much worse than missing a dead one.)

So since I can't be a sensible person and stop wanting what I can't have or find something new, better, to want, all I can hope for and work on now is to stop wanting. Because if I don't want anything, I won't keep feeling so hurt and raw and cut open every damn day when I can't have it.