Another "Reaching Toward Another"

Reaching Toward Another

A friend once warned me that if I took the drug Wellbutrin I should be prepared to lose weight, because I would crave nothing. She both looked and sounded intense, and that’s exactly how she said it: “You will crave nothing.” I did take it, and she was wrong. I craved right through the Wellbutrin. Actually, I understand crave in all its’ conjugations: I crave, I craved, I have craved, I am craving, I will have craved. If you say them all out loud, fast, you start to hear words like raving and crazy, and yes, I understand those, too.


What would it be like to crave nothing? Does the Dalai Lama crave? I heard him interviewed on public radio yesterday, and he does seem quite calm in his discussion of what he wants (peace, it would seem), although he wants it so much that one might call it craving. Perhaps more a yearn than a crave. I don’t yearn; I definitely crave.


Another friend once told me that the best exercise one could do when trying to lose weight (I wasn’t) was the “push away” (from the table). After I’d pushed her off her chair, she went on to explain that one should always leave the table able to say “I sure could use some more of that”. So I told her what she could use some more of, and then spent the next thirty years trying to understand what she meant. I’ve done of my best navel gazing around the idea.


It’s evolved into the question of “what is enough?” Be it love, food, money, sex, chocolate or vacuuming, it’s one of the hardest questions for me to answer. I tend to reach for the chocolate more often than the vacuum cleaner, but both plague me, having actually vacuumed the air around me, trying to catch the dust before it’s settled, craving a clean house.


As age mellows me (still waiting for the mellowing part), perhaps my craving will settle into yearning, yearning will yield to hope, hope to contentment, contentment to peace of mind, which is what I’ve really craved all along.

JanEO
2/23/10