Member-only story
What if you’re already complete?
Most people go through life feeling incomplete, so we spend our time striving for something that fills the gap. What we’re looking for varies of course. Some people are looking for God, in one of its various forms, be it a man on a cloud or spiritual nirvana, or the love we feel we never got from our parents.
We spend our lives searching for the love of our lives, or the job of our dreams, or the body of someone else’s. Whatever it is, adult life is almost entirely concerned with finding a sense of completeness, or keeping hold of it once we do.
And so we move. Literally and figuratively. We travel the world or climb the corporate ladder or play the field. We search under every rock we can think of. We make ourselves into the person that we hope will attract the right partner. We demonstrate more humility and equanimity than our spiritual peers in the hopes of beating them to whatever the goal is. We follow every diet that guarantees a new “us” in only seven days. But whether we succeed or fail, the completeness we’re searching for still evades us.
Unsurprisingly, some people just give up at this point. They decide that the goal itself is an illusion — or at least more trouble than it’s worth — so they make do with something that’s close…
