Possession

Human existence is nothing if not a matter of possession. We are possessed by a spirit of wanting, and it is this essential possession that drives us toward all other possessions. The possession of certain beliefs, to abate an unnerving sense of the uncertain. The possession of objects and things, to soothe a sense of emptiness that sometimes seems endless. We can be reticent to own it, ironically, but wanting is what defines us most in our actual day-to-day experience as creatures. Wanting love. Wanting connection. Wanting safety. Wanting purpose. Wanting recognition. Wanting meaning. Yet with or without and prior to any of these particular desires, there is also wanting itself, curiously pulsating inside us, an ancient restlessness, an ethereal longing, an incessant grasping, an elemental agitation, a more or less constant and subtle modulation of the deep, as Seymour Slive might have put it. What is this wanting, really? We are each intimately familiar with it. And human culture seems unimaginable apart from it. Yet defining this yearning is difficult indeed. Deep down, this wanting, the essence of possession, feels like a thirst, a hunger, a kind of appetite, although aimless and unsure of itself without some specific to keep in view. Prior to obsessing over a specific source of sustenance, wanting alone is quite the mystifying element to behold. Feeling its fluctuations, noticing its rhythms within us, without shame or self-judgment, we might observe how wanting appears neither intrinsically good or bad but simply to be a part of the adrenaline of our creatureliness, an invisible energy animating our interiority. Rather than thinking this possession requires an exorcism—which is the base impulse behind so much religious advice—we might instead view this elementary avarice as an echo, of the most ancient variety, through aeons of evolution, and perhaps even prior to animate reality, a primordial impetus to not only be but also become. Even when it is not pretty or perfect, and even when it is more real than you want it to be, as Michelle Obama wrote, your story of becoming is what you have, what you will always have. It is your most personal possession. It is something to own.