What we want?

One of my friends asked me: “Do we really know in true sense as to …..what do we really want in life?”

I think we always know what we want in life. It’s only that after getting ‘that’, we usually conclude that that’s not what we wanted. Some people conclude it fast, some take time. I believe that after travelling from one dream to another, some dream would be the final one. I also believe for the same reason that we have to keep taking chances with the assumption that this dream is the final one.

When we ask this common question: ‘do we know what we want’, we tend to lose the motivation to act. We extrapolate from our past experience and assume that what we want to do now is also not what I ‘really’ want. I believe here that imagination or someone else’s experience is not the right replacement for one’s own experience. If I now want to setup cooperatives in some village and I happen to meet someone who has already done it, it’s very likely that he/she says that I started with similar dream and succeeded in setting it up but, I didn’t get the happiness I had imagined. I faced the same politics, same conflicts, same behavioural issues, etc. If I decide to not act on what I want, I am depriving myself from that experience and hence, the learning.

I imagine that the goal of everyone’s life is to have a variety of experiences. This variety may vary from one person to other based on his/her circumstances and temporary wants but, will finally lead to the same place. So, the way to go is to follow our ‘temporary wants’ with the preparation that this could be temporary (or this could also be the last one).