Longing

Longing.

What a desolate word. Misleading in its simplicity, and somewhat terrifying in the loneliness that it hints at. Surely that has to be the most futile emotion of all. Unseeing and unfeeling of the great adventure you are living, instead searching and looking, almost blindly, into a memory. Or an illusion? You try to grab it, but it stays just out of reach, taunting you with its nearness and its clarity.

Sometimes you long for a quiet interlude among all the noise, the sight of green leaves, and blue water. Just somewhere where you can hear your own thoughts and have a quiet conversation with a cheeky parakeet that comes to say hello. The room to breathe and hear yourself drawing breath. You long for peace and an uncomplicated time. To be still and let life flow past you, with its frenetic pace, while you rest and rejoice in the stillness. For you remember that there is joy in being still. If only you could turn down the noise like on the music player.

There is so much more you long for. You long, sometimes, for shared laughter and tears and fights and scraped knees with friends gone far away. The longing sometimes can be for something you cannot describe, a memory, a moment, that suddenly comes upon your mind when you chance upon a verse, a sound, a smell or the sound of someone’s laughter. You long for the one person who you could always say anything to. When you turn to tell someone about something funny that happened earlier that day that you know they would giggle at, and they are not there. They are at the other end of the world and it’s past midnight there now so you just pretend you shared the joke with them. And they laughed exactly as you knew they would.

Other times, you long for a time when life was all about hellos. These days it seems like you are only saying goodbye. And with every goodbye it feels like you have lost a piece of you so precious that you will never quite be able to replace it. You long to unsay all those goodbyes and undo all those farewell embraces and take back the promise to stay in touch through the virtual world. You wish there were more pages in the story and the book would never end. Never mind the little voice that reminds you that every ending is a new beginning.

But the deepest longing perhaps is for something that never really was, with a heart reaching for what truly might have been but wasn’t. The longing for a conversation that never happened, that for a joke never shared, for a story never laughed at, a sunrise never sighed over, a mountain never climbed, or a poem never cried over. With a memory, there is the comfort that you lived the moment, and you can relive it over and over again any time you like. But with an unfulfilled wish, there is only a strange restlessness and a certain knowledge of your own foolishness. And a desire to stamp out the feeling and the foolishness along with it. Ah, the sweet insanity of dreams buried deep but not forgotten.

Tomorrow will be different, you say. Yes, surely it will. For with the morning sun, the sharp edges of longing will fade to a dull ache, and after a few more suns it will smooth into a warm glow and lose its sting. You may even smile at the memory, in fact you almost certainly will. For if you do not indulge your foolish self, who will ? If you do don’t embrace the start of a new day with wide open arms and turn your face towards the sunlight, away from the dark, who will? If you do not learn to turn your memories into smiles and your goodbyes into ‘until we meet again’s, indeed, who will?

So don’t struggle against the longing, open your arms to it as the adventure it is. Let it wash over you, bend you, draw you into its depths, break you apart a bit to let the light in and change you. For out of your deepest wishes both fulfilled and unfulfilled, and your most vivid dreams and painful longings come your greatest transformations.

And transform you will. For, when all is said and done, that is what this gig called life is all about.