I don’t want to have something, so much as to want something. Let’s just start there.

To want something in a way that’s severe, intense, even uncomfortable. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

You knew how to do it once, when you were a child. To want a cookie, a toy, whatever your sibling had that you didn’t. Admit it: that kicking, screaming child wants to stay at the playground for 5 more minutes with more intensity than you would want a $1M in a briefcase if I held it under your nose.

Wants, as it turns out, are quite inconvenient. You learn, in time, that acting on many of your wants alienates you from friends, peers, family, the law. Maybe your wants come to be accompanied with a deep and pernicious guilt. Or maybe you simply can’t get the thing you want, no matter how much you try. And holding an incessant, immediate, childlike want in tension with these realities can become its own particular form of agony.

Who could blame you for thinking it was the wants which were the problem? Who did anything but nod in approval as you progressively suppressed and banished the pesky devils.

But look at you now. Look what you did… Your wants—the poor ostracized things—are hardly alive. And hardly alive are you. “Death to self!” That was what you cried, as you sat on top of that one particularly vivacious want until its wrigglings slowly ceased. What did you expect?

That’s how you learned the truth about wants: the agony is merely the price you pay for something far more dear.

Now you’re ready to embrace the agony and want with abandon. And so am I. Maybe we won’t have what we want, but let’s let that be something to kick and scream about.