Want is not just a four letter word, it's a powerful conductor of life-force energy encapsulated in alphabetic cuneiform. It can be so powerful, that sometimes we can come to believe that our own wants have it out for us. If I only ate what I wanted, my body would suffer (chocolate chip cookies all day/every day ends in tummy aches and gained weight). If I spent what I wanted all the time, I’d go broke (booking vacations to music festivals in Aruba and Spain on maxed out credit cards might have me coming home to an eviction notice). Is that what I actually want for myself? No. Deeper down, in the quiet, still, inner moments - I realize I WANT what is best for me - I want a healthy, fortified me. There are the wants that are fleeting and then there are the wants that give our lives meaning.
What do you want?
It can be easy for us to fear what we want, but if we're keeping our want on too tight a leash we’ll never be able to trust it (or ourselves). It's also easy to surrender to outside opinions on what and how we should want, but that gets us most lost of all. When we recycle and embody our own truth around want, we begin to truly attune to our inner voice. Then, by listening we follow our very own yellow brick road.
Thankfully our wants are destined to be unique rather than universal, and act as built-in compasses. No one has the exact same wants as you. Have you ever wanted to be a touring DJ/talk-show host/fashion-designer in gold stilettos? No? Exactly. That’s what I thought. Wants are a finger print, a snow flake, an encrypted password solely and totally yours. Taking a closer look under the hood, that ‘want’ of yours is acting as an arrow pointing toward your purpose. In other words, your purpose is hiding inside your wants. So trust them!
It’s not as simple as want → pursue → get → have. We’re constantly confronted with the inner impasse of want versus want. Shout out to all those times you had to make a choice between two or more wants. In the saying ‘I got all I ever wanted’ - the myth lies in the word ‘all.’ We are eternally forced to decide between our wants, and in doing so, we build our Hierarchy of Want. You’ve heard of Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ - well there is also a pyramid of want, but this one is all yours and only yours to define. As you begin to orient your wants up their hierarchy, you will begin to act around the things you want MOST. The question then isn’t ‘how do I get everything I want?’, it’s actually ‘what do I want most?’
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