What is it We Want When We Can’t Stop Wanting?

Over the years, I have discovered the life-changing power of routine. The little routines I establish tell the truth about what is important to me, about what I value in life, and set the trajectory of my journey through it. Our routines tell us who we are.

As I sit at my desk, gazing out my office window, I drift in my thoughts back to my routine  20 years ago .

Back then, every day for most of the afternoon I watched the clock—anxious to get off work, hop in my car, and pull over to the 7-11 just around the corner for a bottle of Thunderbird wine that gets me to my regular bar for happy hour. There I would sit next to strangers or mild acquaintances, talk about everything I did not know, while never speaking an honest word about who I was or how I felt. This was my routine. This is who I had become.

In stark contrast to that, I reflect on how my routine has have changed over  these twenty years. I am suddenly overcome by one of those moments of realization where deep gratitude springs up and I erupt into thanksgiving and praise.

Here is how my afternoon  went today; I did not watch the clock, I worked until the work day was over, I drive straight home listening to an audio book, I head straight back to my office, and spend the hour before dinner in prayer and meditation, reflecting on my day, and writing.

How does one get from there to here? It had nothing to do with my willpower or abilities.

In my work with men in recovery, I see this same type of change in basic routines happen to others over and over. Transformed routines transform the person.

What is it that causes such a drastic change, and is this same phenomenon available to all men and women—whether addict or not?

I believe it is, and I believe it comes down to one thing— the reclamation of our original DESIRE.

I believe we are all born into this world wanting –wanting we don’t know what. As the title of this essay says, which I borrowed from a line from the poet and essayist Christian Wiman,

“What is it we want when we can’t stop wanting?”

In one word, it is GOD. We come into this world unknowingly wanting God. Most of us spend the first half of our lives in a restless pursuit of an unrecognizable and vague drive for something more, until our dissatisfaction becomes so great that we become open to an experience beyond our knowledge or understanding. We become open to God. If we are lucky, it happens early. Sometimes, it happens early, but then we allow this receptivity to God and spiritual things to slip through our fingers. Yes, that is me.

The French Mathematician and mystic Blaise Pascal said: “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known to us through his son, Jesus Christ.”

The great Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung was partial to the problem of addiction. He believed addiction was much more than a physical ailment. Although the physical was a significant part of the phenomena of addiction, he believed addiction was a misplaced search to satisfy an existential and spiritual hunger, and that a solution to addiction must be based on the spiritual and metaphysical, or there would be no hope of recovery.

“His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God. It can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to higher understanding. You might be led to that goal by an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends, or through a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism. — Carl Jung   (NOTE: These Words would form the basis of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement.)

 Ah, this metaphor of hunger and thirst, two of the three elemental drives that sustain life (the other, the auto-impulse to breathe) appears repeatedly in mystical and spiritual literature.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness (i.e. wholeness) for they shall be filled.” MA 5:6

“You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you” Psalm 63“

As the deer pants for the water brooks, So my soul pants for You, O God. Ps. 42:1 

“Ho! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; And you who have no money come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk Without money and without cost. IS 55:1           

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me will not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst. John 6:35

That  “act of grace”   mentioned in the Jung quote was what I have come to know as the end of my self-reliance. It was in fact a “the gift of desperation”. This was the point when my wants and my desires began to be shifted from “things” to a person—to a God I was now open to, one that was personal to me and committed to my well-being. I must have known this before, early in my life. But, I became lost to it somewhere along the way.

This gift of desperation initiated a release from my futile efforts to change myself. I recognized I had been trying to fill my existential and spiritual hunger with things—primarily alcohol.

Material things do not console, not for long. Even my desire for those intangible things such as prestige and popularity, cannot replace feelings of anxiety, unrest, discontent, loneliness, disappointment, isolation, or melancholy. They only replace God. The desire for things displaces our innate and inherent desire for God, for our existential desire to return to the one who made us.

Within us all lies a spiritual homing impulse that will not leave us alone until it brings us back to our original home. This impulse is relentlessly determined to form within us a resistance to the rigid materialism of our age—a materialism not simply in the sense of wanting stuff, but in a materialism that fails to recognize and acknowledge any realities that are not material in nature, i.e. spirituality– a materialism that demands we conform.

What is it YOU want when YOU can’t stop wanting?

Could it be you too have been searching for something in this life that will quench your multiple desires, fill the emptiness in your heart, satiate the dissatisfaction you may feel with your life? The good news (it may not seem so good at this moment, depending on your current viewpoint), is there is only one answer—a loving God personal to you.

I cannot stop my wanting until my wanting is reduced to one thing: to be in a loving union with my creator, and to be where he is, doing what he wills I do;

“There is one thing I ask of the Lord—for this I long,

To live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life—

To savor the sweetness of the Lord, to look upon his dwelling

For there he keeps me safe in his tent.” Psalm 27

With this one desire, all other desires fade out of focus and have little influence left. The incessant thirst and hunger for things that ultimately bring dissatisfaction is quenched.

If I want this one thing, union with God and his purposes for me, I will be satisfied.

My routines today are designed to make sure I stay that way.

Kind Regards,

Bob