Desire

You can plan your life, right down to the very last detail and you can try to follow that plan with as much faith as you can bring yourself to exhibit.  All this you can do, but life always throws us a curve ball, something we can't predict or something which we never thought would happen to us - others yes, but never to us.  Equally you can be in complete disarray, have no plan, no idea where you want to go, if you even want to go anywhere.  What we want can often be one of the hardest questions we can ask.

I have said before and devoted an entire post to the question of "How are you?" and the complexity of the answer, but equally when confronted with the question "What do you want?" but more often than not, the answer can simply be "I don't know" - at least for me it is.  Just as the question of how we feel can be answered with the idea of queues of priorities, the question of what we want can be answered again with similar queues and priorities.  There will be immediacies, things we want right now, and there will be delays, things we want over time.  However unlike the emotive queues posed in the previous post I am not sure these wants can be organised into priorities in the same way.  I often find that my judgement is clouded that I put things I want in the moment before things I want in the long term, but then is that really how your wants should be prioritised, it can be true to say that things we want right now may be things that need to be taken care of, but then that beggars the question, is it really a want, or is it a need? - the distinction between want and need is a topic of debate in itself.  For now suffice is to say that for me, wants are desires and needs are necessity, and therefore wants are not a priority, all wants would be of equal weight.

If all wants are of equal weight then when confronted with a choice of the immediate or of a long term want the natural choice is to opt to satisfy the immediate.  There are a number of issues with that.  Things you want for the long term are often things that would make you happy, for longer, whereas things you want in the moment are often things that will make you happy for a short time but ultimately leave you back where you started, wanting the long term desires with no immediate until another comes along.

All this it seems would be easily solved by ignoring all those immediate wants and focus on the future alone and the long term desires.  I take issue with that however as I see this as dangerous.  As Albus Dumbledore said to Harry "It does not do to dwell on dreams Harry, and forget to live" - I see focusing only on the future and long term desires, never satisfying the wants for things in the moment as being an abandonment of life.  To dwell on the future and things we want in the long term - to dream - is to forget the moment.

How then do you strike a balance between the two?