Desire's opening?
In chess there are hundreds of openings and thousands of variations, each one is a different game, they have different opportunities and weaknesses, what is common is that once you start down one path you have to play within the limitations of that opening, there is no point in playing the queen's gambit as if it was the king's, you have to play what is in front of you. The same is true for emotions and feelings, you respond to what is rather than what you want to play with, you might want joy but if all you have is desire, you need to walk the board that you are on. If desire is what you have, that is the tool that you use, there is no point in hoping for something else, or pretend that you are above such basic impulses. You are a human being, be exactly as human as you are, be the human that desires when you are desiring things, or god forbid something as complex as joy, happiness or grace in the face of the suffering that is part of being alive, desiring joy is not the problem, ignoring that desire is.
You have to start somewhere, and desire is so powerful and obvious that it is in fact one of the most important tool that you have to work with, it is the motivating factor that get you in to the world of making thing better if the first place. Self-improvement through exercise, playing, minimising, peak performance, these are all good fun in and of themselves, but they are also a path through which desire becomes actionable and takes shape. There are rewards for desire, the feeling of a job well done, of progress in a skill, pleasant sleepiness at the end of the day, these are good things and should be treasured just as much as peace and tranquillity. Even being drenched in sweat from a hard labour is a wonderful thing, it feels satisfying, and you end up with something useful at the end like a shed, a painted wall or hard wood flooring, and every time you walk past or on them, you will remember that feeling as pride, you build a real connection that you can not get by just paying for them, and it started from a desire.
Desire gets things done, it gives you a reason to pursue not just simple things but complex tasks, by making you desire the outcome of all that work. Losing weight is not necessarily an experience full of joy, and whilst there is a logical method to undertaking this task (less fuel in, more out, no sugar, walk more) it is not easy because it is overwhelmingly an emotional problem, that is where desire comes in, you need not just to understand it, but to use it in it's most constructive manner.
Desire keeps us motivated, gives us the will to try again in the face of failure, it lets us enjoy the process of running the experiments to see what works for you. Without desire you are never going to try hard things like having an eating window ( eight to twelve hours where you eat, and the rest of the day it is no food, just water or coffee with a little milk) it does not seem rational until you try it, why would you voluntarily starve yourself if you did not have to. However it is only by using desire that you get to examine desire in detail, it is only by being hungry late at night or early in the morning that you find out that if you do not eat, you do not actually die immediately, that you can easily live without fulfilling every desire you have, that you can delay gratification and that it is good for you.
You might rationally know that you can starve for sixty days without any serious effect on your health, but knowing it and experiencing it, is two different things, our limitations are much broader than anyone ready realises, and our desires keep us safe away from these dangerous frontiers, they steer us back to the safe middle. Our thirst, hunger, need for warmth and comfort are very real pressure both internally and externally, desire guides us away and dissatisfaction drives us away from the edge, part of our self-regulation and at the same time observable to us through our thoughts and within our conscious view, we witness them in the physical world and feel them through our internal landscape. That is why we need to use them skilfully, to play with them, the first bite of every meal is the best, the secret and most important ingredient in any meals is hunger, that is why the better the restaurant, the longer they make you wait, that half an hour waiting at the bar is not due to poor time management, it is part of the experience, it is the deliberate cultivating of appetite and desire.
What is most important is to never ignore your desire or deny it's existence, that is like wearing a hat on a windy day and then being utterly confused by your hat blowing off, just imagine how funny, strange and disturbing it would be for an adult to be confused by such an event, and yet there are plenty of people who try and pretend that desire is just an illusion, that you just ignore it and it goes away. That is someone trying to find their hat, there is no other way to understand their behaviour, you might have the desire not to feel pain, that does not mean it is going to be fulfilled, though you do get to change your relationship to pain. There is an opportunity to change your relationship with anything to a more healthy and happy one, there are no bad relationships just misunderstanding, bad reactions and poor expectations, but this can be evolved into one where you expect nothing from a thing except what it is.
Desire is a process, it drives your actions but it has nothing to do with the outcome or the satisfaction that you feel at the end, desire fuels your journey it tempts you with happiness, it tells you things will be better if you have a certain object or the character of space and time that you want. However as soon as your desire is satisfied it disappears like a mirage, it moves onto the next thing, everything it promised like happiness, peace and fulness never actually happens, it just moves onto the next thing it wants. It has a never ending shopping list, and it only job is to get you through it and to the bottom which of course never comes, it is part of a process, it is in fact not conscious, it can not be reasoned with, as it does not have any needs of it's self, it is just a way of your subconscious to get what it needs, you are tricking yourself, and it is so convincing because it has always been with you since early childhood.
It is not good or bad, it is just a tool of the mind to ensure the survival of the body, and it works, you have to admire it for that, it kept you alive when you were a toddler, and it keeps you safe now, it protects and improves you. What it requires from you is your understanding that it is imperfect, just like you, it needs your leadership, your guidance, it wants you to question it, test it, to find out if you really want what it is offering, and it's currency is your attention, if you pay attention to a desire it grows. If you really want a new phone, you get to decide if you feed your desire or not, if you start researching prices, models, what the benefits are, your desire will grow, you will think about it more, and a cycle of thoughts and feeling develop, where the desire becomes emotional as well as logical. When you want to test your desire, you just have to withdraw your attention and see if it comes back again, so often it doesn't, especially as you have so many others.
We do not get to give up all our desires and who would really want to, we do get to be skilful in their use, if we are desiring a perfect body, we can mould that into a love of our happy and healthy body, one which is good enough and does it's job without getting hung up on the last inch or whether it is “beach ready”. There is never a paradise that we are going to reach, it does not exist, we just get reality like it or not, it does not care, we are not that important, we just are. We get to be a messy and enjoy the process of untangling ourselves as there are always more problems and desires, you get rid of one and another one pops up, what we do get to have is the sense that we are competence individuals who can cope with problems and desires in a skilful way, that we have control and are using it for our benefit and others. Which sounds like a pretty good life to me, not perfect but good enough, and that is all I desire.
