Tag: fantasise

Desire All

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I’ve been fantasising again about running away and living a life of adventure. I should probably be clearer there, I daily fantasise about running away and living a life of adventure. It’s a tricky one coming from a life of seemingly constant travel to one in which I’m now in one place for three months shy of a year. It’s not that I’ve never stayed this long in one place. On two separate occasions I went a year, but they were in slightly more exotic places, Ibiza and Athens. There are times I wonder why I left either of them but I know why. It’ll probably also be why I leave here too. The problem though is that when I’m constantly on the move I start to find myself craving some stability and a home. It’s like I want the opposite extreme of whichever extreme I’m currently living. I share this not because I like to share, although I clearly do, but because I know I’m not alone in this kind of thing. We do this, we all do this. Maybe not to such extremes or perhaps a different type of extreme, but we all desire what we don’t have.

The question then is what hole are we trying to fill when we decide to fulfil our desires. I say this not just in the sense of running off and finding a boat to an exotic land, but I, we, buy things too. We desire and consume stuff, just lots of random stuff, and this must be for a reason other than because either we need it or we’re zombies who’ve been bitten by capitalism’s contagion. Sorry about the alliteration, I’m fallible. The point is though that there must be something we’re searching for other than the obvious; the adventure or the new t-shirt. Have they found a way of hacking into our inner selves and discovering that we have empty spaces which need filling. Or has life and the world we live in created these holes that we’re constantly trying to find answers for.

Desire is not a new thing. People in huts a thousand years ago desired something more so they sailed the seas and invaded countries. There may have been necessity and survival in a way very different to our own but there was still desire too. People have always craved jewels, there were wars fought over nutmeg, people killed for love. There is something natural about desire then, it’s about improving our own circumstances and making our lives better. It’s that drive that makes things better through ideas and inventions. Yet we are told by Eastern Philosophy to be objective and tame the desires within.

Ultimately these desires lead to suffering. I don’t doubt the Christian Bible will say something similar, as will the Koran. So is one right and the other wrong? Life is never so simple. We can use our desires to improve our worlds we live in, to help us strive, but if we can’t do anything about it then we will only suffer through our desire. If something is out of our control what is the point of allowing desire to take over. We must learn to be more objective, just be careful not to desire it, although it must be in our control so surely that’s fine. I was going to suggest it’s a crazy minefield with no answer but that all seems pretty simple and straightforward to me. Now then, that palm tree I was thinking about, I’m sure that’s something within my control…

What Could Have Been

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

The one important thing to remember when we’re worrying or being down on ourselves is that we’re not alone. While our lives are unique there are similarities with others; we’ve all loved or hated someone, worried about something that has been fine or has been a complete failure, regretted doing or not doing things, enjoyed our own company and been painfully bored, and so on and so on. Emotional similarities are easier to point to because we can all say we’ve experienced a moment of happiness. This happiness is comparative to less happy moments in our lives and we’ve all experienced happier and comparatively less happier moments. I imagine me running down the beach is not unique but also not everyone has done this. We can always shape a feeling to fit.

Today then I experienced the emotion of regret. I regretted an inaction in my past and the course my life has taken as a result. I was listening to a podcast with a chef and a restaurant owner discussing cooking, food, techniques, food as art etc and I remembered a desire I had when I was about sixteen to become a chef and open a restaurant in Dublin. That was my plan. I’ve persuaded myself that the only reason I didn’t do it was because I was persuaded against it, that life as a chef is volatile and hard work. In reality there are an infinite number of reasons life didn’t take that course, one of them being that I just did something else. But I felt regret, that I should have done that instead of whatever I did do. I can admit this because like I said, we’ve all experienced the same emotion and probably a few out there over that exact scenario.

The truth is though that the mind plays many tricks on us and in this case I craved an idea. It is nothing more than an idea, and worse than that it’s a fantasy of an idea. We imagine this situation, what could have been and it’s always perfect. Life isn’t necessarily bad, I have it good in many ways but like everyone we have days which vary in degrees of satisfaction. In times like today we fantasise, but that’s all it is, it’s a fantasy and it’s not real. I then later dreamt of being a writer and after that an actor.

I don’t say any of this in a bad way, as I write this I don’t feel sad. Of course what ifs are not always fun and don’t always signify positivity but they’re just examples of one version out of an infinite versions of possible realities. We also don’t know whether we would have survived in that version, perhaps I would have had a heart attack by now from all the rich restaurant food I was eating. I would probably be much fatter than I am, but as a chef I would also be on a steady diet of amphetamines so that would have probably cut my appetite considerably. It’s fun to explore these moments but also not worth taking them too seriously. There’s a reason we never made it happen then and despite the fantasising now, there’s a reason we’re not rushing off to do it anytime soon. And it’s not likely because we can’t.

Think Quick Proud Man

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I had an interesting interaction today and it made me think about how we instinctively respond to people and how we then spend the next hour fantasising about how we would like to have responded to them. In truth it wasn’t even a big thing and I didn’t really dwell on it but it reminded me of times in the past I have. I will explain what happened. At work I had to go and pick up something from one place and take it to another because they had run out, I won’t bore you with those details. When I asked for them the woman in the shop asked “Why?”, I said “because they had run out of them”, she then asked whether there were none at all in the stores and I confirmed there were none at all, she went and got them as she had a lot to spare. Quite a nothing conversation but she didn’t need to ask why or quiz me on whether there were any in the stores, I wouldn’t have asked for some if they hadn’t run out which seems obvious or if there were any in the stores, and her why was not necessarily friendly inquisitive but not overly rude either. I responded in my usually unthreatening way and I left with what I was after.

Afterwards however the mind takes over. It starts to point out that I didn’t need to explain myself or why I was after what I was after, and I wished then that I had said this to her. I then thought about people I know who would have responded in that manner and envied them, wondering what it was that made them capable of doing that and not me. Are people just quick thinking, are they permanently on the defensive, are they permanently on the attack, are they just prepared from past fantasies of their own. In the moment I didn’t even notice anything, it was just a normal interaction. I don’t go into situations defensively or aggressively and while I may fantasise and wish I pulled people up more often when they’re being rude, in the moment these things happen I rarely give an actual shit. I’ve heard it said that the ego takes over afterwards, that the true self is the person who responds in the moment. Maybe there’s some truth in that as it’s only ever my pride which whines and fantasises after events, it rarely exists in these moments as they happen. Or maybe it does and I’m just caught off guard. I’m evidently not an instinctive fighter always on alert though, and I don’t know if I want to be in truth. Anyway, enough of this, if I carry on about it too much I may just convince myself I am bothered and really what’s the point in that.