“I don’t know what I want” is one of the most common defenses of a divided mind.
The conflict inherent in it is rarely an absence of clarity. More often, it is a refusal to tolerate the presence of a desire.
One might want opposing things. Or want something that they will not allow themselves to experience, or pursue what they believe they ought to want to satisfy an inherited template of security. To hide from this internal division, the intellect manufactures sophisticated layers of justification.
Money is the most socially accepted instrument for this bargaining. It acts as a justification for discomfort around many desires. But the obstruction is rarely the money, rather it is our relationship with our desires.
Instead of looking in this direction, our relationship with money is weaponized as an arbiter of permission, to decide if a movement of life is allowed to exist. We insist that our deepest longings present a financial business case before they are allowed to breathe into the material world.
But true desire operates entirely outside the logic of commerce.
It is an unreasoned impulse – a pulling from within that arrives without explanation, default utility, or justification. It is life expressing itself, simply because it can.
When it surfaces, it inevitably disrupts the carefully managed boundaries of an identity. When this internal movement is misread as a threat, the intellect creates a position of opposition, choosing the familiar friction of internal conflict over the unfamiliar magnitude of expansive aliveness.
Money cannot buy the capacity to receive. To possess capital while remaining incapable of holding a true desire without arguing, negotiating, or rationalizing it is a specific kind of poverty. It renders one a spectator of their own unlived life.
To be able to receive true desires from within, is a capacity that comes with being human. To stay with the energy of these desires, to hold them without demanding that they prove their worth or justify their cost, is to honor that capacity of life itself.
