Really - or wanting?
Love is a shared, active process of truth finding that calls upon freedom.
I asked him whether, if possible, he could choose one of the following words as reflecting what is most important to him: love, truth, or freedom.
“Well,”, he said, “this is impossible, at some point they all merge. Do you really want me to differentiate?”
“Let’s see what the experiment brings.”
We had an engaging conversation, resulting in the definition mentioned above.
The conversation grew also out of an introspective process. I was thinking about how I felt trapped in some way, in the last couple of years. How I felt less free and was seeking to understand what this was all about. Of course, when one seeks, it helps to ask questions that might get to the bottom of things, of conditionings. What do I really want? What am I looking for? Am I looking for something? Am I looking, really?
It took more than a rejection of old answers to know what the unrest was all about.
I had all these stories going on about how my life – now conditioned by motherhood, more dependent on support from others, impacted by a new kind of relationship with my partner in which we needed to work with the parent/partner balance, more online (and less offline, intimate) meetings during and after the corona pandemic, a sense and intuition that my work should take a new existential turn, the continuous devastating consequences of day-to-day and political decisions on each other and our ecosystem - wasn’t structured in a way that fitted what I wanted. My changed life, a growing awareness and old coping mechanisms did not work anymore to convince myself that I was….. free, loved and loving, and doing what was truthful…? Is this life really what I want? something inside of me asked.
It took some time to realize I was questioning myself whether I really, just really, really, really wanted to be free, love(d) and truthful. It took some challenging situations, a dive into my learned relational and emotional skills, sitting with the existential unrest of our lives, and still, to this day; the time to sit with the process and keep on doing self-inquiry. The situations, and the effort to dig deep into what was happening, taught and teach me how wanting something is not the same as loving something, how wanting is not per se the same as setting it free and seeing the truth of it. How 'really' and 'wanting' were two different perspectives intertwined in one question.
I do not demand the world into existence. This was confrontational, little toddler-me was at the heart of the matter. Beautifully, the new encounter with little toddler-me taught I yearned for something. That I yearn – and mourn. Painfully, it reflected how this yearning had been conditioned to look for it in ways that even disregard the primal yearning, the primal tears kissing the yearning into a truth in and of itself.
It took the disintegration of certain conditionings around love, freedom, and truth to see that I am yearning for these to guide me, but I cannot, on the long run, silence my seeking for them by putting a veil on them as to shape them into a form feeling less vulnerable, more approachable, less painful, or more controllable. I can not want the truth and thereby bring it into life, as if truth reflects what I want. I can not want love and thereby create it as such, as if this is something that I hold in my owns hands only. I can not want freedom, and then suppose it is here because I demand so. They are all here, and if I really want them to be here, it is the wanting, the projecting, that covers up my potential recognition of their existentiality, and even of the yearning spurring me towards a humbling hello to the grandiosity and vulnerability of life – the truth, love, and freedom of the matter, ultimately.