What Do You Need? What Do You Demand?
I was talking with a psychotherapist earlier today, and he made what I considered to be a very interesting distinction: between needs and demands. For a long time, I've been interested in the interplay between 'needs' (as Abraham Maslow and others have dealt with them) and 'wants' (those desires that help us to move forward). In the process, I've discovered that, as your wants are satisfied, they become needs. This is the way we grow, building upon our personal experiential history, one step at a time. This also explains why, for people who have chosen the path of self-fulfillment, our lives become increasingly more complex. And, as a side issue, it also gives us a solid rationale why our society grows incrementally in complexity as well.
Examine how your life has unfolded thus far. If you're reading this at all, it's only because you're interested in how your life is unfolding. Observe how, from season to season as you grow and develop (and that never stops, no matter your age), everything becomes increasingly complex. Even when you begin to 'slow down' and 'simplify' when you've entered your maturity, that only happens because you've already developed with such depth and complexity that you can no longer sustain a more superficial, external complexity at the same level you could have when you were younger, and your world was simpler. Complexification is not an option; in fact, it's one of the four principle forces behind the evolution of the universe.
I remember talking with a young man many years ago, while I was still in the active ministry, about some point of belief. He came from a fundamentalist background which I did not share. To support his argument that 'this is the way things are and you're wrong', he referred to some passage from Scripture that I knew very well. He was misinterpreting the passage because he was interpreting the words according to a contemporary context — a set of meanings that were unknown in Biblical times. I tried to explain the nuances of the wording to him, and he got very upset with me. "You're just trying to make it complicated," he snapped at me and turned and walked away. He could not cope with a spiritual world that was at least as complex as the physical one, so he demanded that the answers to the Great Questions of life be simple and uncomplicated. But, they're most decidedly not like that.
What happens when we impose our demands on the world of our experience? That simple and common mistake — more than anything else — distorts our perceptions and obscures our decision-making. As conscious human beings, you and I have an incredible capacity for imagination. As Robert Kennedy once said, "I see things that never were, and ask, why not?" Our creativity enriches our world because it provides the energy to actualize our unrealized potential. At the same time, that very creativity can also shape our vision of things as they are, throwing us into an equally unbounded world of denial. From this denial of world as it is comes our demands that it be as we would wish it to be, rather than the way we find it.
The world as we know it is ordered in its complexity and diversity. Those are the facts. Nothing's simple; nothing's straight-forward; nothing's easy. We can demand that it be other than what it is, but that won't change anything. There is really no secret to living a happy, successful life. It's just a matter of a very few fundamental attitudes: accept things as they are, engage yourself in making things better, trust that, whatever the outcome, your efforts will turn out for the best: there is an order, a plan, and you're part of it. Take care of your needs, let go of your demands. As the famous Desiderata reminds us, "The universe is unfolding as it should."
H. Les Brown, MA, FCC
Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown
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