what do you want?

or, what krishna told arjuna.

i can’t turn around without being told to do what i want. pursue it, go for it, life is too short, jump in headfirst, do it with abandon. abandoning who, or what? it’s an ancient question: self or duty, love or—love.

because that’s really the crux of it. there are two things you want, two things you love, at odds. which do you love more? what takes precedence?

arjuna told krishna he did not want to fight. he had dharma to his family, his cousins. but to protect the greater world—this was his greater dharma.

i think i have to change what i want.

i feel like my family has failed me. i feel alone. i feel like i cannot rely on anyone to the extent that i want. to desire, to attach yourself to anything outside yourself, is ruin. until recently i didn’t understand it. now, now—

people ask me, what do you want.

what i want, as opposed to what is my responsibility: an ancient problem, ancestral.

i want to write and draw and travel freely.

i want to be taken care of.

i want to feel safe enough to give up and go to sleep.

i feel i am running. i feel i am chasing something i will never receive. the things i want.

and i am prolonging my grief for the things that never happened, are not happening, may never happen.

i want to change the things i want.

i want to be content taking care of other people. my dharma, my duty. i want to fulfill this without ego. i want to be happy in what i’ve chosen to do, doubting&knowing i’d be unhappy if i’d made any other choice.

the path i thought i wanted is closed to me.

the path i still sometimes want more than anything is closed to me.

i’m not happy. i want, i want.

i want to have been loved and parented in a way that didn’t make so many shards out of me. i want to be supported by external forces: my family, my friends, my darling wife. for all i’ve done to lighten it, the weight is pressing on my head, my brain, my eyes, so many cubic feet of ocean, i’m in sunken depths, i’m drowning, i’m in the trench in the cut of the rock of the earth, i’m more dramatic than anything, i exist in my head, i exist on this earth making not one scratch, the future is in place and has always been.

this is not my first life and it won’t be my last. lately, i have to believe it.

we bow to krishna but krishna loved arjuna, and was arjuna, and is me. the divine is my sweet aching sister, and my loving bitter father, and my hurt vengeful mother. god is my favorite person, my lover, my wife, who on the worst of these days feels lost to me, who is me, who is my future, and my past, and my now everything.

it’s easiest to see myself and therefore god in arjuna, struggling, skeptical, resistant to the truth in front of him, caught off guard by an old friend, his best friend, who by all accounts should have been on his side. and who was on his side. and who loved him. and who was him. and who argued and taught and mocked and adored him until arjuna saw the naked truth of the universe, breathless-beautiful, unpalatable, contending with itself, with him, within him, without him, spilling over, incapable of spilling over because it was everything.

i want to live assuredly, unswayedly, unfazed by the outcome, letting these fleeting feelings pass me by whether they’re mine or someone else’s. i want to be content being a sliver of truth, a small drop of everything.

i want to stop mourning.

i want to stop wanting someone else to hold me.

i want to want nothing but to be what and how and who i’m supposed to be, who i already am, who i already was, and will be.

—

the morning after writing this, it is a new day. i watched the sun rise, pink on restless blue.

change and sameness are the only real thing.

—

i spent an hour editing this draft, and then lost it, which is not what i wanted at all. i’m letting it go, a lesson from me, to me. krishna to arjuna, waving.