Everything You Want

I was sitting on the terrace sewing a block for my quilt when my son walked outside.  “Why aren’t you smiling,” he asked, “you have everything you want.  You should be smiling.”

And I thought to myself that he was right.  I “possessed” all the things, materially and spiritual, that I truly find important in life.

About ten eight years ago, I made a list of all the THINGS I wanted to have in life. It started out as a long list I would occasionally read over the list and strike something off of it, if it no longer seemed to be important to my well-being. 

The list was eventually whittled down to five items which I consider to be of great importance to me.  Of the five, I possess four: health, love, a farm in France, and a creative life. 

What I find so interesting about my son’s comment is that he, a materialistic eighteen-year-old, programmed by the dictates of society and the media, was able to divine that I do have everything I want.   When I first made my wish list, it was a long list filled with desires that were the result of decades of brainwashing from my family, society, and the media.  As I examined the list and weeded out what others thought I should be striving to achieve, and what my heart really wanted, the list became incredibly small and simple. 

I was writing in my journal a few years ago, that the best year of my life was when I was nine years old.  When I was nine, I felt that whatever I could dream up was mine simply for the dreaming.  I wasn’t worried about how I looked.  I was loved unconditionally by my parents. I hadn’t entered into the trauma that dealing with boys would bring into my life.  I played the violin and the piano.  I took dance lessons.  I had a pony.  I ran around our family farm building little villages.  I had my business sewing Barbie Doll clothes by hand and making good money selling them at school. Weekly trips to the small local library were exotic adventures for me. There was no greater happiness for me than to get lost in the books I devoured.  I wrote little mysteries with two girlfriends of mine.  I greatly enjoyed school and learning.

Then, in the summer before I turned ten, my best girlfriend Amy Crowe was hit by a car and died and all innocence and potential flew out of my window.  Her death made me reject religion.  On her gravestone, her parents had carved, “Thy Will Be Done,” and I didn’t want any part of a God whose will was to kill a nine-year-old girl on a busy road. By rejecting the Catholicism in which I had been indoctrinated, I ended up questioning everything.  Life now seemed abysmally short and serious to me.  If we were only going to be here such a short time, then I had to do something grand . . . like save the world.  Suddenly, I became a very serious person, passionate about everything that had meaning and no meaning. I was the somber person in a toothpaste-smiling world.

When I realized a few years ago that I considered 1967-1968 to be my best age, I went back and analyzed what made me so happy then, before Amy’s death.  What I discovered was that I was surrounded by nature, I had a loving family, I had many friends, I was creative, and I was inquisitive.  I wasn’t yet corrupted by the outside world demanding that I be sexy, that I live to consume, that I be successful in the way society defines success, that I try and please every man who crossed my path, that my teeth be incredibly white, that I weigh 110 pounds, that I always say the right thing, etc., etc., ad nausea.  When I was nine, I just WAS.  I didn’t have to meditate to find out who I really was.  I knew it with every cell of my being and that is why I was so happy.  I didn’t question who I was because I hadn’t yet been taught to question and criticize who I was.

As I started to realize that I had once possessed happiness and bliss, way back when I was nine, I compared my master LIST to the list of what made me happy when I was nine, and I was thrilled to discover that the master LIST was being whittled down mirror the same list of happy elements that filled my life when I was nine.  Love.  Nature.  Health.  Creativity.  Slowly, without conscious effort, my soul was trying desperately to pull me back to these core elements that for me constitute the foundations of my personal happiness. When I was able to crawl out from all the garbage that had been heaped upon my hapless soul over the decades, I was able to discover that I once “had it all” and if I once “had it all” that meant that having defined that past happiness, I could try to happen upon it again. Slowly, I clawed my way out from the heap to reclaim my innate joy.  This clawing required that I write daily in a journal to examine my life and that I work hard to exclude the outside media, and its incessant messages that work against my happiness.

So what great joy I felt yesterday, when a materialistic eighteen-year-old could divine that I had everything I wanted.  I felt that I had arrived.  I had been able to strip myself down to my original, unsullied soul and that perhaps the real me was becoming visible to the outside world.  What an amazing gift to be able to say at the age of forty-five that I have it all.  I’m no longer searching for anything.  What is, IS and I joyfully accept that.