Longing— by Lucky

A report from the Slow Lane

Somewhere, some time ago, I felt so disconnected. This was before my stroke, when I lived in the normal world. I was longing for something I didn’t know I had. I longed to feel more connected, I didn’t know to whom or what, I just knew there was a feeling of emptiness inside. I was unseated by this feeling, unbalanced enough that I tended to blame everyone: family, wife, friends, culture, and mostly, in my heart of hearts, myself. I didn’t know that I was longing for something that had always been with me, that I was suffering a kind of reverse phantom limb syndrome. I was longing for a part of me (or my experience) that was present, but I couldn’t perceive it. Now longing indicates to me the awakening of unknown capabilities.

Longing seems to me to be one of the first phases of waking up. I had a dream recently that awakened me. The dream was vivid and it endured long enough, that in the dream I had time enough to think about what I was experiencing. As the experience went on I could feel, more and more, a desire to try an express what I could see. I felt, in the dream, a tremendous longing, that turned into a kind of action. The action ended up not being what I thought and it awakened me, left me aroused by the dream, awake, and uncertain about what had just happened. Longing, which occurred in the dream, awakened me.  To make a long story short it brought me too a new kind of awareness.

I think I have felt longing most of my life. Mostly, I have ignored it. Longing always seemed so ambiguous and distant that I couldn’t do anything with it. It was unlike desire, which would also haunt me, because desire would always be for some identifiable person or thing.  Longing instead was hard to identify and even harder to satisfy. I let it remain on the periphery of my awareness, primarily because I didn’t know what else to do with it.

So, generally, I had longings, but I didn’t really pay attention to them. That’s good, because if I had tried to do anything with them, I probably would have done the wrong thing. It’s starting to look like the longings that have accompanied me, have shaped me. Instead of me doing something with them, they seem to have done something with me. Longing seems to have been the first stirrings of a dim awareness; an awakening of some unknown part of me (or my consciousness). Longing was a herald that announced the arrival of new, still distant, possibilities, unknown mes, awkward beginnings.

Longing is a funny feeling. I don’t know how it is for you, but for me, I have some mixture of feelings. There is some form of inchoate excitement. This comes over me like having something not yet identifiable appear on a long inactive radar screen. I also feel a form of pain. It is like a kind of birth pang. This isn’t a dull ache, but it is there, like a subtle warning sign, obvious, but not too obvious.  I also have some sense of this being really ancient, like it has been around, and ignored, for a longtime. I’m having some kind of orphan feeling.

There is also a taste of grief. It is as if something ancient is coming near home at last. There is something prodigal about what happens for me. Its like what is coming is somehow returning. My heart is just as closed to it now as it was then, whenever then was, and I want no more than to barely notice. Longing seems to hang out near some barely remembered, and never-used gateway.

I’ve come to see the dimly recognizable a lot more clearly now. I hate to admit it, but I’m still ambivalent, I don’t easily give admission to new seemingly vagrant aspects of who I am. Longing is more trustworthy now, but I’m not sure I am. I reluctantly let myself be aware of what keeps knocking at my gate.

Still, I have learned something, longing is an early sign (perhaps an expression) of something coming into consciousness. I like longing a lot more now. It still is dusty and road-weary, having suffered too much exile, and it still meets a wary me, but by and large I trust that it is an emissary of what is. My gate is more open than closed now. Connection is still a longing, but it is more like longing for a loved one to come home than for an adult child who’s been away so long that is like letting a stranger into the house. Both are welcome, but one is easier to take in.

I long for the day when it is easier to welcome all my parts home.