83: So what do I want?

In my teens I often considered going for a career in music. I played the piano quite well.

But I think I sort of despised the idea of ending up somewhere in between. There are few careers in music unless you "make it big". I often wondered about those who just ended up teaching somewhere. Did their ambitions desert them? Was their potential not enough? Or was their love primarily for teaching, rather than for music?

All three of these possible explanations depressed me. I knew that, realistically, I couldn't expect to get much further myself.

Looking back, I'm not sure what my standard response to that was. I remember that sometimes I was in a state of denial, assuring myself that I would in fact play the world's great stages someday. Other times I looked more towards a vagabond existence in which I'd travel the world, keeping music as a hobby but never really an ambition.

It must have been clear to me that neither of these goals was realistic. So what was my realistic portrayal of my future?

I'm not sure. But I do think that I got suspicious of taking any of my dreams or ambitions too seriously. They were doomed to fail, so it made more sense to not get emotionally attached to them.

If there is one word that summarizes what I have wanted most consistently in my life, that word would have to be "impermeability". I wanted to be out of reach of disappointment. I knew I could never be spared pain or injustice, but I thought that maybe I could become immune to it. At the very least, I could minimize it. And the best way to minimize the potential for disappointment is to expect nothing good to come your way. I am suspicious of my dreams. I am afraid of falling in love. I am afraid of having a lot to lose. I have always been sure that I will in fact lose everything, and have always tried to minimize what I am attached to.

I failed. In spite of my efforts, I did have hopes and expectations. And they were shattered.

I sort of saw my remaining decades of being alive as one long quest to remain as emotionally detached as possible. I expected everything that I became attached to to be taken away. The problem was not in things being taken away from me; the problem was in me being attached to them. You can take everything from me if I don't care whether I have it or not. That's what I wanted to become.

This wasn't working either. In spite of my efforts, I keep being emotionally attached to things. I keep having hopes and expectations. It sets me up for disappointment and pain and all sorts of nasty stuff.

What do I want? Mostly things that imply a passive state, maybe a state of being protected. I want rest. I want peace. I want serenity. I want an absence of tension. Being sentient means being in tension. This is a problem. I don't want problems. I want rest.

It sounds like the closest that I want to do is "nothing". But why do I always sabotage that? Why, when I actually come close to doing nothing, am I driven to doing something? Sometimes so driven that I do anything, anything to not have to be doing nothing? Is my desire to do nothing maybe the desire for the impossible, because I know that I am not capable of doing nothing, not able to really be at rest, not able to tolerate a lack of tension? Or do I sabotage my own desire for fear that any desire, even if it is a desire for nothingness (or let's say, especially if it is a desire for nothingness), is sure to disappoint?

If you want to be safe by detaching yourself from all your desires, then you run into a paradox, because your desire to detach yourself from all desires is in itself a desire you must detach yourself from. How do you do that? How on earth can that be done?