Desire Minimizes What We Have Already Managed To Do
Desire is directly linked to success. So we have to be careful because many desires can be blinding and make us give up or despise what we already have. Arturo Graf, Italian writer and poet, said the following: In order to feel sure of ourselves, motivated and peaceful throughout our life, we must desire little and expect even less.
Not fulfilling our desires or fulfilling all of them always leads to a negative side. The second option may not seem that bad, but letting ourselves be carried away by whatever we desire can lead us to a dead end, a kind of vicious cycle in which we will never be satisfied.
Should desires obey reason? No not necessarily. But it is clear that they can turn into naive and disproportionate aspirations that prevent us from seeing the wealth we already have and cause us to focus on that of others. Desiring only what we can have is necessary to live this part of our existence in a reasonable way.
Desire forces us to want what we don’t have
Before we long for something, we must make sure of the happiness that it brings to the one who possesses it. It was said in Ancient Greece that the more desires you sow, the less happiness you harvest. It is as if our strengths increase when our desires decrease.
Horace, one of the leading lyrical and satirical poets of the Latin language, approaches desire from a both limiting and enriching perspective. To solve the problem, he ends up concluding that whoever gets what is sufficient for him / her should not desire more things.
Hoping for what we want is human and necessary. And putting up with what happens to us is the key to happiness. We believe that we will only be happy when we have what we want: and often our emptiness is born when we get this thing. According to George Bernard Shaw, there are two tragedies in life: one is not being able to get what the heart asks for; the other is to achieve it. In this same line of thought, we find Heraclitus, Greek philosopher, who affirms that it is better not that the men have what they desire.
If we don’t want our desires to be frustrated, we have to desire things that depend on us
Not all desires are inherently bad. Some can even make us better people. Having blind faith in what we want opens a door for us to self-realization and self-knowledge, the highest peak of human need. A soul is measured by the amplitude of its desires, just as a cathedral is judged in advance by the height of its towers.
Some thinkers even believe that there is only one driving force: desire. It is therefore important to emphasize the positive part of the need to achieve our goals. Without this all-powerful force, we would not have witnessed all the great advances of humanity. Basically, these are due to irrational urges and the disproportionate desire to succeed, achieve wealth and improve.
The desires of our life form a chain whose links are none other than the hopes of fulfilling them. Perhaps these desires fascinate us because they represent the only way to overcome our fears. The problem with desires is not in having them: it is in how we express those needs. Wanting something unreachable in a disproportionate way will never make us happy.
On the other hand, being passionate and motivated by achieving a realistic goal is one of the most beneficial aspects that we can have in our life. As in almost all aspects of life, the key is to desire in moderation and in a reasonable way.
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