The Pursuit For Something More

As a child I wanted to be a judge. Then came: lawyer, doctor, actor, lawyer, writer, psychiatrist, actor, and writer. Whether I get any of those is yet to be determined. It doesn’t concern me every waking hour. When I was a tween, I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to be popular, part of the in-crowd. I got that…for a while, at least. And then like all great empires, mine fell, because I moved. It didn’t concern me once I was gone. Now I’m a teen. You ask me: what do I want? Well, I don’t know. I think I want to be happy. I think I want to be loved. I think I want to be free. But what does that mean? And will I get it? How do I get it? And is it really, well, and truly what I want? Again, I don’t know. And that, I believe is the problem.

Rarely, does anyone know what they really want. We, or at least the majority of us, race through life with no goals that truly ignite our passion. It’s a self-destructive race; we’re moving towards what we think we want, because we’ve perceived it that way or someone has told us it is what we want. Being so caught up in the win once we achieve our goal, no one takes into consideration whether our successes are truly satisfactory; whether we care after we’ve had it. We feel the euphoria and elation of getting what they’ve been aiming for, but once that’s passed, what’s left? More wants, more desires. It’s a cycle that never ends.

As humans evolved, so apparently, did our needs. And when we achieved our newest needs, there always seemed to be more, newer ones, for us to purse. The basics stayed the same: food, water, shelter. However we seemed to need big houses because the warm, cozy ones weren’t enough; we seemed to need cars, because now we weren’t used to walking far, or couldn’t reach certain distances in certain amounts of time without one; we seemed to need phones instead of walking over and talking face-to-face. And those were just the material things.

We change – improve, create – to achieve our goals and yet once we do, we always want more; we always want better. It seems to me that we’re looking for something more, but because the question as to what it is remains unknown, our thirst for it pushes us to keep looking and pursuing it until we find it. Perhaps, we are all just lost in a pursuit together: a pursuit for something more; a pursuit for something greater.