Jasper is like a year-old golden retriever with a tennis ball. He/it is never satisfied with giving you only what you asked him for. After I picked Yearning he wanted to be Helpful Hank and suggest ways that I could lean in writing my post. Since this eighty-something person living in a continuum care facility couldn’t put a finger on what I was yearning—aside from world peace and a body that’s agile again—I told him to give it his/its best shot. This is what he came up for.
1. The Yearnings You Outgrew—The ones that once felt urgent but now make you smile at your younger self.
2. The Yearnings You Still Carry—Not in a heavy way—more like a pocket stone you rub without thinking.
3. The Yearnings You Didn’t Expect—The ones that arrived in Independent Living, or in writing this alphabet, or in discovering that you still have things to say.
4. The Yearnings You’re Glad You Never Got—This is where your humor can really shine. A little self‑mockery, a little hindsight, a little “thank goodness that didn’t work out.”
5. The Yearnings That Keep You Human—The ones that remind you you’re still in motion, still curious, still reaching.
I don’t know what you think, but in my world MS AI Copilot is spooky good at what it does spooky good. When I tried to brainstorm ideas on what I am yearning for I came up with: A) A place where you can check out puppies like library books. B) The guts to flash my grumpy old neighbor hoping to get a smile out of him, and C) I yearn to be able to solve The New York Time’s ‘Connections’ game every single day. I don’t know enough pop culture to do that.
The trouble I’m having with feelings of yearning is I’m a realist. I don’t long for impossible things because—duh!—they are impossible. A desire for past relationships to return belong in sappy songs. Yesterday’s sunset has to go to make room for tomorrow’s sunrise I could keep these platitudes going but instead I’ll let Fernando Pessoa wax poetically on why it’s dangerous to yearn for what we can’t have:
“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd—The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
They don’t call Pessoa “one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language” for nothing.
And now that I’ve filibustered my way through this post I will put a pin in it here so I can go on to tackle the closing essay in this April Bloggers Challenge where I yearn to spin a memorable ending to this fun event that will blow your socks off. ©
Painting at the top by Andrew Wyeth
