Longing

I close my eyes, and my head begins to nod.  I sigh deeply.  My belly expands; my chest and shoulders rise.  Then I exhale, and my frame collapses once more, slouching a little further forward.  I posses a dim awareness of the things about me – the rather uncomfortable, hard chair with no arm rests; the collar of the jacket I have removed and hung on the back of that chair; the shoes I have kicked off, on top of which my bare feet now rest.  My hands are folded in my lap.  My back was straight only moments ago.  My feet are shoulder width apart, my knees bent at perfect ninety degree angles.  Only my head betrays me, and though my shoulders and entire torso are soon to follow it, for now my entire body except my head is held in an attitude of respectful attention.  I meant to maintain that attitude when I walked into class.  But alas, I am mortal, and this battle has proven too great for me.

            Sleep is an entirely inconvenient necessity for the person who can never seem to get enough of it.  I sometimes wonder in my more imaginative moments if it would not be preferable to stay awake for two weeks straight, suffer permanent brain damage, and thereby find a way to excuse myself from the demands of education and productive citizenship than to catch an hour here, three hours there, and the occasional blessed six hours of uninterrupted sleep.  I realize these contemplations are not the noblest ones ever to settle in my mind.  But no matter.  Even if my brain in its laziness concluded that insanity would be preferable to the awareness of perpetual exhaustion (which it could not since I am terribly afraid of losing control of my own thoughts), still my body would not allow me to get no sleep rather than too little.  If I were capable of staying awake for more than forty-eight hours, I would certainly never allow myself to suffer the indignity of falling asleep in class.  I still recall the terror of waking up in my eight a.m. to find my professor looking directly at me.  It took me a moment to figure out where I was, and I never did determine exactly how long I had been out.

            In a life where sleep is so rare and precious and always leaves me longing for more, it seems a cruel trick of my mind that it should ever be troubled with nightmares.  Yet it is sometimes.  Within the past few nights, for instance, I have dreamt that I and everyone I love most in the world were being chased by some sort of government agents in business suits.  These men had faces, but while the rest of the dream was sharp and crisp, those faces were vague and indistinct.  I became separated from all the people I was trying to protect and finally had to face the terrible, inhuman men alone, knowing that I could not fight them and that if I ran they would catch not only me but my dear ones who had scattered throughout the maze-like building, which seemed incongruously to be an opera house.  So I did the only brave thing I could do and stood there talking to them, stalling, waiting for a savior who did not come.  All the while, they said little and smiled the terrible smiles of evil people who know they have won.  I woke unsure of where I was and began hunting in my pillowcase for my cell phone, which I use as an alarm.  I finally found it open on the bed beside me.  I had evidently turned off the alarm in my sleep and slept an hour longer than I had meant to, so deep was I in the dreadful drama that was unfolding in my mind.  I lay there a few moments longer, wanting...what did I want?  My heart was still pounding in desperation, and I was covered in cold sweat.  Yet the sensation at the forefront of my mind was not that of fear but that of longing.

            The next night I dreamt that familiar dream in which the dreamer finds herself naked in public, all the more terrible because no one else seems to care that a human body has been completely uncovered.  It is frightening and perhaps shameful to bare oneself, but to find oneself bare and to be ignored, insignificant – that is the shared nightmare of human experience.  We long and dread to reveal what we are, whether by the substance of the body or of the soul.  We long for someone who could understand it – the essence, more than mere personality – and we attempt to reveal ourselves before no one else.  But how many times have men and women bared themselves, body and soul, before an alleged soul mate only to be met with an evident lack of comprehension?  How many times have men and women sat confounded by the complexities of a character they thought they had comprehended? 

            As I become an adult, I reluctantly begin to acknowledge that true intimacy may not be possible among beings like ourselves.  It would take a great deal more growth and many more years to achieve true intimacy with even one other person.  Yet still we seek it.  Still we need it.  Still many of us would die for it if we really thought we had found it.  But how can we find it?  So many of us, failing even to find ourselves seek to find others while pleading with them to find us.  Vanity.  It is impossible.  We cannot know, and so we trust.  In the best cases involving the most selfless people, trust is the next best thing to intimacy, but it only replaces one longing with another – the longing to know and be known with the longing to find that on the relatively small amount of intelligence we have gathered about another human being we have been able to build a correct assessment of his character.

***

            We go to bed at night beset by longings – to have someone by us, to undo some mistake, to forget the day we have just come from, to leap into the next day in which we know we will have too much to do again, to break the endless monotony of similar days, to sleep, perchance to dream.  All these longings and more play in our minds as we fall asleep, but we generally wake with only one.  More.  Even if we wake from nightmares, as adults, many of us would rather go back to sleep and finish the dream than to escape at the cost of starting a real day.  We would rather be eaten by imaginary monsters than slowly consumed by our fellow man.  But we wake anyway, and we rub the longing out of our eyes and try to ignore it for the rest of the day.  Get to work.  That should cure it.

            By evening we are once more haunted by at least half-a-dozen longings.  By morning we have once more distilled them into one.  More sleep.  But that isn’t all.  Sleep isn’t enough in itself, whether we get three hours or nine.  We want even more than sleep.  We want rest that is more than rest.  We want peace that is more than peace.  We want shalom.  We want to be enveloped in a complete wellness and befriended by Someone much greater than ourselves – One who comprehends us enough to be intimate.  We want to be whole.  We long to be the selves we thought we were when we were children.  We long to be mythic heroes, epic warriors or breathtaking beauties or both.  We long for a land and a people big enough to contain all we thought we could be.

            Few of us ever allow such thoughts to surface.  We were taught long ago that they were dangerous.  We fear becoming mad little Don Quixotes, tilting at windmills while the world laughs, spending our lives with nothing to show for it.  If we are heroes, we feel that our Author has accidently dropped us into the dullest novel of manners the world has ever read instead of the ancient epic which should have been our destiny. 

            So we square our shoulders and get to work.  When we hurt, we keep busy.  When we are confused, we keep busy.  When someone dies, we keep busy.  When we think ourselves in love, we keep too busy to question the validity of the relationship.  If we ignore all our problems, perhaps they’ll go away.  We cannot fight them.  The world we inhabit won’t allow for that.  Hang up the sword and the shield.  Hang up the horn.  For that matter, hang up the brush and palette.  Hang up the easel.  Hang up the violin.  Reach for the calculator.  Its answers are more definite.  But hang up any encroaching thoughts about the beautiful universal order that allows for such a thing as mathematics.  Hang it all and lighten up and convince yourself to be happy.

***

            Happiness is a chocolate-covered strawberry.  I sought to prove this to my creative writing classmates last year by bringing them two plates full of the small, juicy, red gems covered in silky chocolate much darker than the brown in my eyes.  The dark chocolate glaze was my own recipe, and it turned out perfect, splendid, scrumptious, and all those other words the culinary set have been known to use, if I do say so myself (which I unapologetically do).  I marched into the room triumphantly, carrying a green plastic dinner plate – the best my dorm room could offer – in each hand.  On each plate was a square of wax paper.  And on each square of paper were four rows of five glistening confections each.  I set one on the front table and one on the back and seated myself on the front row with a half smile as my classmates began to exclaim excitedly.

            When the plate was passed to me, I picked up one of my delicious creations with three fingers and raised it slowly to my lips.  I inhaled the smooth, strong, slightly bitter scent of chocolate and the sweet tang of strawberry at the same time, taking note of one sensation after the other.  I opened my mouth, fit it gently around a third of the berry, and closed my teeth.  The first thing I tasted was the juice, tart and invigorating.  At the same moment, I felt the soft, fragile surface of the chocolate shell give way, cracking at first and then beginning to melt against my tongue.  Before the flavor of the juice could turn to the mild, sweet aftertaste of strawberry, the rich, earthy, bittersweet chocolate interposed itself.  Neither flavor erased the other, and the full effect could only be achieved through their harmony.

            The flavors left images in my mind.  With the first crisp tartness of strawberry, I imagined myself playing in a golden, late-summer field with a group of laughing children.  A cabin waited at the corner of the field.  As the chocolate began to play with my senses, I curled up on a couch inside that cabin.  The children were all sleeping in other rooms.  A fire crackled on the hearth.  A strong arm passed around my shoulders, and as I leaned against the warm chest of the man to whom it was attached, I could almost hear his heartbeat.  I smiled.

            Within seconds, the whole vision began to sink once more into the recesses of my memory.  The man got up to stoke the embers, and I woke up before he could sit back down.  The aftertaste of strawberry and chocolate danced away with my senses until only a little lingering glow remained to remind my tongue what it had just experienced.  And all of it took seconds.

            I wanted to hold on to the fleeting, pleasure-inspired daydreams.  I wanted to go back and forget about class and just dream.  I reached for another strawberry.  And another.

            I don’t remember laughing or weeping in the days that followed this experience.  But I do know that a few hours later, perhaps even a few minutes later, I would not have been able to describe myself as distinctly happy.  Content, perhaps, but not really happy.  The moment had passed.  I had smiled at my flavor-induced dreams.  Then they left.  That was all there was to those moments, but I couldn’t accept that it was that simple.

            There were a handful of strawberries left after class, and I took them back to my room.  Over the next few days, I kept nibbling them, savoring them, recapturing that moment of transcendent bliss.  But each time it grew weaker.  I could not keep approaching happiness in the same way day after day; my senses became dull to the complexities of the many layers.  I began to ask myself, “Why does happiness treat us so indifferently when we seek her so earnestly?”

            But what if all I wanted wasn’t in the strawberries at all?  After all, it was the dreams I longed to recapture.  But I wanted something beyond even them.  I wanted to be Home.  My moment of happiness had given me a window, and that was what I had really been trying to find again.

***

            I have often wished for all the trouble it causes that I could abolish longing.  But I have never wished so in earnest.  I can recall a handful of moments when I reached my hands up and found something above them.  I have let my fingers brush the floor of heaven from time to time.  I still remember joy that reached beyond pleasure.  I still remember real sleep, the sleep of my childhood.  I slept soundly back before I knew so much.  I thought back then that my parents were perfect, that if I was a good girl life would work out fine, that I would one day have a forest of my own and a field full of horses and seven children and that they would all love me, that everyone I knew would love me because I was a good child and I was determined to get better. 

            Since then, I have changed my mind about a lot of things.  But I still reach for sleep and joy and love; I still long for shalom.  One day, I still believe, I will find it.  All the longing will be worth it if I find where it leads. 

            Perhaps one day my life will be made all beautiful like the half-remembered dream where I danced on a silver beach with crystal waves in the moonlight.  I saw a troop of children coming down the beach toward me, and before I knew it they were all around me, and I laughed for joy to find myself part of their dance rather than merely my own.  And I was one of them; I was a child.  We left no footprints.  A beautiful music floated on the wind, and there were words in it which I remembered for a moment when I woke.  I wept hard that evening when I tried in vain to write them down.  As we all danced together for that moment, though, the sun began to rise over the ocean, but it was not Sol.  It had a face, and that face was the face of a golden lion.  I wondered, but I was not afraid.  Suddenly, he was on the beach, and I could feel his breath.  That was shalom.  There in that place for those few moments, I remember feeling more awake than I have ever felt while my mortal eyes were open.

***

            Longing does not lead us to chocolate-covered strawberries.  It does not lead to sleep.  It doesn’t even lead to human intimacy.  We carry on at a mad pace trying to fill the hole with something, anything.  We scramble to grab success, or we accept defeat and turn to drugs, alcohol, and a multitude of other addictions.  We never let ourselves be haunted long enough to find out Who is haunting us.  In time, most of us give up and conclude that longing leads to nothing.  We kill it, and in doing so we kill our true selves.  We curse the things for which we think we long.  And then we curse the longing.

            Happiness is not cruel in withdrawing and leaving longing behind it.  Earthly blessings are still good things.  They let us look out on a place where life is as close as we can conceive of to the way it should be – perhaps closer than we could imagine left to ourselves.  Happiness is only a messenger from worlds where a still, small voice whispers, “Seek, and you shall find.”  It withdraws once that message has been delivered, yet so often we seek the wrong thing.  We seek the messenger.  We pursue every conceivable expression of happiness, convinced that each is different and may hold a new key.  They do not.

            What would we find if, instead of pursuing happiness in circles, we sought the worlds from which the messenger called Happiness hails?  Eye has not seen.  Ear has not heard.  But we hear whispers.  Perhaps one day I will learn to follow those whispers to their origin instead of giving up halfway.  The world is filled, after all, with chocolate-covered strawberries and pretty dreams – little reminders of glory – but they are not enough.  We can stuff ourselves to the brim with good flavors, we can sleep all day, but it will never be enough.  It is not meant to be.

***

            The rain caught me yesterday and I was drenched within minutes.  I turned my face up to the sky and laughed and danced for joy, and it was good.  Silver light flooded the world through the clouds, and it was good.  Golden leaves blew around on the sidewalk and in the air, and it was good.  It’s all good.  And we ourselves are part of it.  But we too are not enough as we are.  We must grow big enough to fill ourselves with bigger things.

            I have not found where longing leads yet.  But next time I eat a chocolate-covered strawberry, I will not eat another one.  Next time my alarm goes off, I will get up.  I will let the longing fill my heart and burn in me.  I will follow it until I reach the One who sent it.