I Dare You to Get Exactly What You Want

A minute later you'll start to stress about losing it. That's what happens when you try to hold on to any heaven. Fortunately, there's another way...

I wake up, and I’m in heaven.

It’s the last day of summer, literally—the equinox is exactly twenty-four hours away—and the seasonal hand-off is in the air:

A cool breeze drifts through the open bedroom window. Squirrels chatter as they store acorns in unseen places. A murder of crows caws in the distance. The rising sun tinges the tops of trees already turning yellow. The leaves there dance in the daylight. They blaze.

Our oldest has just turned twenty-one, which is unfathomable—I’ve been a dad for a whole adult. On his birthday, he moved from one of Chicago’s dicier neighborhoods to one just steps from his favorite beach on Lake Michigan. It feels like we’ve checked another of life’s precarious passages off the list.

Our middle son, now sixteen, had a sleepover and the boys are stirring downstairs, waking themselves for Saturday morning soccer practice, laughing. They seem to be walking together between the raindrops of today’s teen drama. It’s a miracle of murmurs coming from the basement.

Our daughter appears in our bedroom, knuckling her bleary eyes, and climbs onto the bed next to my wife. She had a funky nightmare the night before. They chatter and laugh about it. I just listen, grateful she still tells us of her dreams.

I think about how utterly lost and lonely I was when I met my wife twenty five years ago this autumn. The lyrics to a song loop in my head:

I don’t know if you know

But I feel you in me,

Inside of my years,

Inside of my bones.

I can feel my wife woven throughout this heaven I’ve woken into, and this is the moment I’d choose to stay in forever, if that’s how things worked.

But that’s not how things work.

Just eighteen hours earlier, we’d talked about moments like this during our monthly Human Hour call—moments in which your heart opens naturally to what is happening right in front of you. For instance, when your favorite team wins the big game, you don’t have to choose to open your heart. It just opens of its own accord. You just celebrate.

During the Human Hour, though, we focused primarily on the practice of openheartedness: the conscious choice to fully experience the present moment as it is, even when it’s not going the way you want.

Why is such a practice so important? Because without it we throttle the data our hardest moments are trying to deliver to us, so our wisdom wilts, our relationships rupture regularly, and our lives shrink down to the size of our very particular preferences.

We’re not free to fully live until we’re free to feel life fully.

Otherwise, it’s just pain management.

However, as I lay there in bed, getting exactly what I want, I can sense my heart closing ever so slightly anyway. It’s not a five-alarm fire. The fight-or-flight response hasn’t been triggered. My nervous system isn’t sizzling.

Not yet, at least.

It’s just a slight densification of something in my solar plexus. A faint thickening of energy there. Like a wisp of a cloud passing over the sun, dulling the daylight within. It’s not the closing of my heart to the arrival of what I don’t want—rather, it’s the closing of my heart to the passing of what I do want.

It’s what happens when you try to hold on to any heaven.

It’s the subtle suffering of pleasure management.

Years ago, when I first started practicing openheartedness, I wouldn’t have noticed this tiny closing at all. Instead, I’d have done a bunch of little clingy things, such as:

• checking the weather in the hopes of more sunny autumn days ahead, only to get bummed that rain showers were rolling in the next day,

• wondering if my extroverted oldest can really be happy living alone again in a one-bedroom apartment, no matter how much lake he can see outside the window,

• trying to make the soccer boys’ morning perfect by leaping out of bed to make them pancakes before practice and then being disappointed they didn’t have time to eat them,

• searching my daughter’s dream for warning signs, and ruminating on ways to rescue her from the chimera,

• or hoping my wife and I will be exactly this happy—forever and ever and ever—and watching vigilantly for threats to it.

Pain management and pleasure management are not opposite kinds of suffering. They are cut from the same cloth. They are both ways of closing your heart to what comes next. They are both your resistance to living the harder things with an open heart.

I dare you to get exactly what you want.

A minute later you’ll start to stress about losing it.

So, may your purpose be not to pass through life until you get to heaven,

but to let life pass through,

with the lightest and most loving of touches,

until the openhearted passage of everything

becomes a rumor of heaven itself.

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