Itch

Always wanting more. Never content for very long. Endlessly desirous of something other. Buy a car. Plan a trip. Make more money. Meditate more fully. These spiritual and material goals are often masquerades, concealing our restlessness and a desire, for more and otherness, a covert attempt to scratch an itch that cannot and will not be satisfied, no matter how creative or hard we try. Curiosity, too, commonly celebrated as a posture of personal growth, might be little more than talcum powder, another attempt to soothe the existential itchiness of the status quo, not an innate desire for truth, but an everyday abeyance of boredom, as one continually seeks novelty and distraction beyond the deep discomforts of being and becoming. Martin Heidegger conceived of curiosity in this light, as a faculty concerned with seeing, only to see, not necessarily or always to understand, learn, and grow as we would like to think. Less nobly, curiosity might be compulsory, against the antsy and itchy we find within.

Is this deep-seated, inward itch something we should seek to quell? Is it a problem, to be mitigated perhaps by our surrender to the popular mechanics of mindfulness techniques saturating the culture, as a way of settling our attention in the moment because of an uncritical bias against our impulse toward transcendence? Or maybe there is something more to notice and appreciate about our self-transcendent tendencies, an inner dynamic for us to pay attention to, and carefully follow, rather than judge and quell.

“What are we to do with our incessant desire for more?” is the wrong question to ask ourselves when we are trying (yet again) to scratch this itch. It seems unrealistic to think we would ever stop itching and scratching completely. It is not in our nature. More realistically, however, we might come to recognize the itch as an invitation: some scarred opening, a sacred revealing, of an uncomfortable yet equally vital aspect of our humanity, namely, that we are intimately in touch with the transcendent already. The instinct to move beyond, and the desire to never settle—this “othering” orientation etched within—might be both annoyance and buoyance, an essential movement that elevates, simultaneously bothering and emboldening us toward higher dimensions of being, so long as we resist the temptation toward the domestication of transcendence, a dumbing down of this instinct by becoming inert and stuck in banal behaviors, like mindless purchasing, or unreflective religiosity, rather than giving ourselves grace to continually supersede, without judgment, anticipation, or expectation. We are subjects continually opening, Karl Rahner said, to the quiet, uncontrollable infinity of reality. Existential itching is simply a symptom of being.