I'm an Expert at Longing But Who Am I Without My Longing?
Been pondering this concept of longing lately.
I can honestly say that most of my life has had a sort of low-level of toska.
Vladimir Nabokov, the famous Russian-American author of ‘Lolita,’ put it best: “No single word in English renders all the shades of ‘toska.’ At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
At this point, I feel like I'm a fucking pro at it. I'm not proud of that by the way. I mean, I could be tied to my egoic desire to be so fucking emo/goth no one could stand me thus keeping everyone just far enough away so that I don't get too attached. But no, I'm just not into it anymore. I'm starting to see it as a huge barrier to my well being and "success" in life. However I am so used to it, it is so ingrained in my thinking that I'm not sure who I am without it. Seriously.
Looking longingly out the window of the Ferry from Belfast to Scotland, wishing I didn’t have to leave Ireland.
Who the fuck am I without my longing? My longing for basically everything in my life? Or longing for what I don’t have or more importantly what I think I don’t have. What do I do with myself and my thoughts if I'm not longing for something? My longing has been a large part of the foundation of much of my music as well. What sort of lame-ass songs would I write without at least a smidge of longing? Would anyone even care to listen? Would I even want to play them?
I believe that I have cleverly disguised some of my longings as goals. This isn’t always true but it is sometimes. However, the point in the longing is to continue longing. Not because I'm not happy or grateful for what I have, because I truly am but it's natural for me to want to stretch myself and see if I can do something "better" or to inspire/help more people. That's a great goal however, I tie it to all these things that I think I need to be better and have no idea how I'll get them so it creates a longing and an idea/belief of lack. As though I currently lack the ability to "be better" (I hate that phrase) or that I lack the intuitive nature to inspire and help others.
The bullshit here is that I seem to be far more willing to long for the thing than to actually do it or have it. Go a few layers deeper and I can see how I'm basically creating/attracting situations where there is much to be longed for but nothing actually acquired. And instead of living more fully in this moment, I'm living in a sort of fantasy land of what will happen in the future instead of what is happening now. Nothing wrong with a healthy imagination, it helps us immensely all across the board to create art and change and so forth. There is a way to use it and a way to abuse it I suppose and this constant longing turns my imagination into a sad place.
I often imagine things being fucking amazing in the future, where I feel happy and fulfilled as do the people around me and basically none of it is dependent on the stuff I have. That’s great. But I am also apt to hang on to the potential of something in the future while foregoing the present or thinking that what is happening right now isn't enough, thus creating a feeling of sadness, to which I have, you guessed it: longing.
I was SO lonely and unsettled in this photo. Def a toska situation. It was all I could do to not try to “find someone” to “fix” it/make it go away.
Welcome to another aspect of my brain my friends. I promise you at this point the longing is more torture than joy. But that’s okay. The fact that I recognize that I'm doing this and how deeply it is embedded in my brain process, is great. Now I can do something with it instead of being subject to it.
This analogy came to me this in my meditation this morning: it's as though I'm trying to grab a thing and instead of just stepping closer to it, I'm reaching and waiting for my arms to grow longer.
Another aspect to this whole longing thing is that perhaps I'm actually too afraid to have the things I long for so I just long for them instead. It's so much easier to keep the things at a distance and come up with a million reasons to not step closer to them than to actually gently grasp them. I realized that my fear lies in getting it and then losing it. Whatever it is, I'm afraid I will get the thing I've been hoping for and working so hard towards for so long and then it will just be gone. So, it makes perfectly logical sense to not have it all than to have had it and then lose it. Right??
Now my experience has shown me that that way of thinking is in fact, not true. Not for me anyway. Easiest example, having pets. I'm 100 times better off having had all of them in my life than never at all. But pets are easy. They require so little really so the level of emotional investment and longing before getting a pet is pretty minimal. In fact it's usually better when I just let them come to me than to try to force it.
So..perhaps I can transfer this attitude of being an animal steward to the rest of my life. And instead of longing for all the things while actually being too afraid to have them, I can just let them come to me? Then there wouldn’t have been this constant agony over it coupled with some sort of expectation about how it should be when I get there. Cos even if I get it and it's fucking amazing, garunteed there will be some aspect of it that wont line up to the expectations that I had. Then I get to decide if I wallow in disappointment over that or am delighted by the surprise of it being different than I expected (because usually it is far better than my expectations).
The other day, my Co-Star horoscope told me this: Your optimism challenges your ability to see that the cure to crushing desire is to experience longing without the expectation of satisfaction.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Jet-lagged and happy, sipping coffee in my friend’s flat in Glasgow Scotland
P.S. I put pics of my trip to Scotland and Ireland on this post because I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt such longing for a place as I did after my return to the US after this trip. I would rather be jet-lagged, lonely or whatever while traveling than much else. More longing..