What do you yearn for?
What do you yearn for?
That is a question that is rarely asked. Sure, I have heard things like, what do you want? What are your goals? Things like that. The question of what do you yearn for? has a special and much deeper meaning to me. Before I go further, lets look at the meanings of yearn.
yearn (yûrn)
v. intr. yearned, yearn·ing, yearns.
1.To have a strong, often melancholy desire.
2.To feel deep pity, sympathy, or tenderness
3. desire strongly or persistently
4. have a yen for
5. have affection for; feel tenderness for
Of the meanings given above, I am mainly talking about the number 1 and 3 definitions. So, now that we are all on the same page, the question could also be stated as: What do you have a strong, persistent desire for in your life?
As I get older, I have noticed that the level of introspection of my motives and actions has greatly increased. Alone with this increase of self observation, the amount of reaction to my environment has also increased. The desire to pull apart moments of time and inspect and store them for future retrieval and inspection has really grown into an almost obsession. This had me looking for the past couple of weeks for a cause to this behavior change. One day earlier this week, I found not an answer, but a question…. what do you yearn for? After this “discovery”, things slowly started to come to the surface. I now have some answers to that question that asked itself to me. The following is what I thought of as my answers.
After writing the article on relationships and the various other articles, I realized that most of them still pointed to the one thing that I didn’t expand upon very well. I yearn for the following:
1. I yearn for a work environment that has a sense of purpose.
This in itself seems like a common enough “goal or desire”, but I am talking about a place where I could feel that I am part of a great whole. Where my efforts not only satisfy me, but go a long way into satisfying the groups goals. I only have had this particular yearning quenched once. It was the early in my Navy career and I was in my first shipboard division. This environment was so unlike the ones I had been around before. There was an honest and well displayed mission of learning and working as a team. Not to say that it was some form of utopia, believe me it wasn’t, but it was closer to what I yearn for than anything else I have ever experienced in a place of work.
Looking at my jobs since, I have not even been close. I have only seen individual efforts to better the environment in which I have been a part. Usually the best I could hope for was that I would have one or two co-workers that believed that their efforts would help the “company” achieve its goals. The saddest thing is that most “companies, departments, divisions and the like,” are not even definitive in what the “goals” are. Everywhere I have been, the goals, mission statements and reasons have been at best an afterthought. Something dreamed up because it had to exist and that is about it. Think about it, how many times have you seen those lame and obviously false statements;
Quality is number one.
Customers service is our primary goal.
Education of our student body is key.
And other such nonsense.
Who in the hell is following those goals. Not many, let me tell you, heck… the worst part is that I don’t have to tell you. I am sure that everyone that has read this far could give me many many more examples to work with. Looking at the examples above, I have to just shake my head in disgust. The letters of the goals may still be visible but the spirit of the goals has long since faded. I have to say that “pride” and the drive to do the best that one (company) can is long gone.
Things like trademarks, water-marks, nameplates and signatures used to mean that you wanted to be recognized for a job that was done and done well. Now it seems that it solely there to hold business territory. A means to sue and hoard the collective attention of the public. When I place a sig on a piece of my artwork, it means that I think it is the best that I can do at the time, not that it is perfect. That I want others to know who it was that created something of value to someone else. It is a level of trust that I am issuing forth to others, with no desire to get back more than I deserve.
So what do I yearn for when it comes to work? I want to work for and be a part of a company were the vast majority of people in the company believe in the company’s mission for being in existence. I am tired of working with people that only goals is to get by for another day, and collect a paycheck for the a minimal job done. I want to work somewhere that I know that I am doing my part in making the company more efficient and delievering products and or services that are best suited for our clients. I think that even if I was a peon in such an establishment… such as a janitor, I could still feels satisfied at the end of the day. Why? Because in that case, making sure that the areas I was tasked with cleaning always looked great, I could insure that the environment that the other employees worked in was not a negative influence on their performance. This would go a long way in helping the rest of the company achieve its goals. The other aspect of this would hopefully be that my efforts would be looked upon in that light and my pay and acknowledgements would show for it.
2. I yearn for deep conversations.
I am of the type that thinks alot and I end up pondering most of the questions I have about life on my own. I am not to say that I lack in having people to talk to, but the ability to share serious thoughts and carry on a long conversation that builds up the knowledge of both individuals involved, that is something that I miss dearly.
When I speak of knowledge, I speak of the knowledge about the subject at hand, but also knowldege of the other person. That sense of understanding the way the other’s mind works. How they perceive your words and what is meant by them. The immediate feedback and the long lasting sense of having shared some meaningful time with another person of like mind.
I have two people that immediately come to mind that gave me that sort of conversation, one is a man… Rick Hughes, and the other is a woman, Bean. Both of those individuals are no longer a part of my life. The reasons for the failure of the relationships, I have to say… were mine. With Bean, I pushed a bit too hard and over-stepped my boundaries. With Rick, a bad business decision started the drift apart and with a move of location, sealed the end. Currently I have a rich environment in which to try again to establish the communications that would possibly lead to deep conversations. I am loathing the effort to try. The Bean incident has shaken me up too much and I feel that the lack of deep conversations was what lead to me overstepping my boundary with her in the first place. I have also noticed that most people that I interact with have a great lack in responding with much more than an agreement to what I have said, and quickly moving on to something less thought provoking. This in itself is increasing my yearning for conversation and putting me in the situation where I have to question my motivations for being around people.
I do not want to hear myself talk, but when I don’t start up conversations, things tend to get very very quiet. I noticed that today, since I wasn’t feeling very well, I was non talkative and the resulting conversations around me were very short and not at all though provoking. It could have been that my mood was affecting the others, but a number of topics came up and none of them seemed to be heading in the involved direction in the first place.
I have also looked for others with a like set of conversation goals that have some sort of web presence, that I may become a part of their “thought sphere”, but it looks to be few and far between. Most of the things only seem to be half baked and one of the sites that I thought was heading in the right direction closed its doors(Kuro5hin.org), possibly forever. I have even contemplated starting a website that focused more on “life” issues, but I am not sure how to start it, or baring that, how to keep the seedier elements at bay it the site “caught” on. I guess I will have to devote even more time to learning the various web “communities” out there, and see if what I yearn for exists in some form already. Even if I find or create something of that nature, I still have the serious(to me at least) issue of finding people willing (not forced by endless questions) to share in the type of conversations that I have written about.
3. I yearn for a partner, yes, a companion of sorts.
At this point in my life, I could care less if there was an romantic elements involved at all. I just want to be around someone that is motived to do “big” things in life. What do I mean by “big”, well I mean, doing things that are impossible or extremely difficult to do alone. Or to be put in better context, working together on things that have a long term positive effect on each person’s life. This, in itself, could take on many forms. Starting and running a small business, working on a website and its contents, building a massive collection of books by a certain author or subject, or something as simple as training a pet to do neat little tricks. I am not very particular about what the subject matter is, only that it be something that both people share on a similar level.
Going deeper into the partnership realm, the goal would be to have a long term female partner, but hey I am not that unrealistic. The terms I stated above would be sufficient to take the sting out of my yearning, at least for a while.
I hope that by reading the above, you have thought a bit on the subject of what is that you yearn for and for all our sakes, I hope that you are well on your way to satisfying the desire. I say “well on you way”, because I think that this desire can never truly be fulfilled in all the aspects that I have described above, but who knows… maybe we can do it anyway.
author- James M Long copyright 2000
