// What do I want?//

This question is absurd to me. I never think about it, and I need to more often. I think it will help me waste less time. I also need to be better about being honest with myself and the people around me instead of cowering away into the back of my mind and silencing myself. I’ve been doing that a lot lately, and it hasn’t resulted in anything good. 

I can tell you what I don’t want: what I have. But who does? Greed is a part of human nature, and the secret of happiness is finding a way to be content with what you have. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to have nothing… to just drop all of the crap at the door and run free into the wilderness. I think it would be exhilarating, refreshing, and incredibly difficult. How would I share my every waking thought with the world without my cell phone, twitter, facebook, tumblr, my laptop? And more importantly, who gives a crap about my every waking thoughts? No one.

Because if we were all out living in the woods, living off the earth, I wouldn’t think about half of the crap I think about now. And if I did, and I shared it with you while we were scavenging for food, you would probably feed me to the wild dogs or something. There are more important things to think about than what I want. For example, what others need. Their pain, their suffering, and how I could help them; How I could find a solution to their problems, meet their needs, ease their suffering. Isn’t that far more important than what I want? Especially when I have so much?

And why can’t we be content with what we have? We work so hard to get it, and then we end up taking it for granted. It’s part of what causes our self-destructive nature. It’s a downward spiral, really. We keep running after the next best thing. We have to have new, new, new all the time. What we already have may work just fine, but it needs to be improved, re-invented, more _fill in the blank_. Honey, didn’t your mama ever teach you? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And because we are so consumed with reaching that higher point, getting something better than what we have, continuing out assent to something more desirable, we abandon the precious things we’ve been given. And we lose them. We lose them and have nothing to fall back down from our high places on but our own sorry behinds.

So I try to want only useful things. Things that aren’t material. Of course, I have material wants just like everyone else. But I try to ignore them until they become a need. What I mean is, I try to focus on the life category under what I want. What do I want to do with my life? What do I want in a relationship? In a husband? In a family? What do I want to be remembered for? You know, those hard, broad questions that no one likes to answer. The ones someone asks you and you answer them with a big “UHHHHH… What? Idk…”

So what do I want? Well, I have no idea. Like I said, I don’t spend much time thinking about it, but I’m determined to change that this summer. I think it would be more efficient to have that figured out. A decision made means more room in my mind to think about other people aside from myself.

So, if ever you run across me in the near future, ask me what I want. Try to be specific, give me something to go off of, and see if I can come up with a solid answer. See if I’ve made any progress. I think when it comes to finding out what you want, you often need the help of friends.