I’ve been thinking about the whole business of always wanting more. It’s a perennial problem indeed. A conflict is apparent. In my case I grew up in a post-Presbyterian environment, in a community, despite enormous material advances, largely still steeped in a mindset of stoical deprivation. I used to feel almost guilty in that environment to be so full of desires and to be lucky enough sometimes to be getting things others didn’t. In later years when I was drawn to a Buddhist type spirituality I found a similar thing: the suggestion that there is an insatiable aspect to the desires of the human condition and that enough is never enough to fulfil that. The more you want, the more you want. Buddhists have it that this is the road to a miserable life and you have to break the chain.

The Presbyterian and Buddhist doctrines in their different ways worked on me setting up a conflicting converse to the sheer impulses of desire and the continual wanting of more. There seemed to be little doubt which was the more elevated side of that dialectic. But now I wonder. Sometimes it seems that existence is so imperfect that it is little more than a never-ending cascade of appetites demanding satisfaction if only temporarily. These primal impulses you have to constantly attend to. As long as you have blood in your veins they never let up. I wonder if that dynamic is just as applicable to other aspects of experience whether it be material aspirations, relationships, even spirituality. Maybe it’s ALL about desire or as Joseph Campbell said: fear and desire, the two main drives for humans.

If you cultivate a philosophy at odds with base instincts, then maybe the very fact that you can is what distinguishes humanity from the rest of nature and I suppose that’s okay. But maybe not, in that it sets up too much conflict, not ever resolvable other than in ascetic conditions. And probably not even then. Who wants to always live in internal conflict? Alternatively, perhaps the thing to do is just to go for it, to respond to the demands of fear and desire and take the consequence. When one urge is satisfied, you just go for another. This becomes the story of your life - i.e. the story of your cravings.

When I look back on my time the most interesting and memorable moments have been when on the case chasing desires, being caught up in the whole business of wanting, getting, losing and finding again. Whatever elevated notions we might have for our potential maybe that’s what humans do - spend their lives satisfying appetites, while some of the time thinking they probably shouldn’t.