Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Closing The Book of Longing


"So I closed the Book of Longing ..."

It's a great line.

The Book of Longing of course is the title of a poetry book by Leonard Cohen. So too goes a line in the  song "That Don't Make It Junk".  Beyond that the phrase reminds us of something that we may all be familiar with.  That longing that will and can never be satisfied.

We can drive ourselves crazy wanting for things that can't be ours, are not possible or are just forever beyond our reach.

Our attachment to the longing we feel can  eat at us. It can blind us to the beauty that is around us right now, and make tasteless the best that our life has to offer us.

What we long for can become like an addiction.  Not having what we long for can become a nagging kind of suffering that we bring into our own life and we can fall into the trap of thinking that the intensity of the longing can make it more likely to come to us.

That of course is not so.

The intensity of the longing only gives us intensity of longing.

And intensity of pain at not having that object of our longing.

Closing our own book of longing could be just the thing to let us see those other things in life that are so good that we have been overlooking.



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