A lot of times in life we get stuck thinking about everything in terms of our desires. Rain today? Shoot, so much for that training run. Traffic jam on the way to work? Ugh, now no time to pick up coffee. Train running on time? Great! I’ll get there in time to hit the store. A meeting cancelled at the last minute? Great. Just what I wanted.
What we want in life is important. And, generally speaking, when things come together in the ways we want, life feels good. It’s helpful to have goals to track, and to help us structure our lives. But when we start to see everything in terms our desires, well, life gets trickier. Life becomes all about satisfying our desires. Our day-to-day starts to become one bucket list after the other. Things that fill the bucket become good, and those that don’t become bad. We start to evaluate everything life throws at us in terms of our desires. We begrudge the things that interfere with our desires, even those we can’t control, and we dismiss the things that don’t help us fill the bucket.
Seeing the world this way just isn’t a great recipe for living a good life. Good lives contain so much more than getting what we want, and if we’re always wearing the lens of desires, we’ll miss out on a lot of experiences that’ll help make our lives good. It’s a good strategy to shed the lens of desire every once and awhile and see what happens. Maybe a rainy day won’t always be bad, and maybe a traffic jam could turn into an opportunity for people-watching.
The more we stop seeing things are good and bad insofar as they help us get what we want, the more opportunities we have for experiences that can enhance our lives, including the interesting ones. As you try to shed those lenses of desires, you might think about replacing them with a sense of wonder. When we bring a sense of wonder to our experiences, we bring a perspective that invites, rather than blocks, the interesting.
Aristotle famously believed that philosophy begins in wonder, but it is just as true that the interesting begins in wonder. Wonder motivates us to learn, rather than to evaluate. It motivates us to approach a new experience with an open mind. It motivates us to ask questions, rather than pre-judging that we have all the information we need. Wonder motivates us to see a new experience as an opportunity. And the more wonder we bring to a new experience, the more interesting that new experience will be.