*Image Credit: Remind
Recently I went to Hungry Jacks (Burger King if you are overseas) for Father’s day. I got to the counter and faced with the usual paradox of choice I wasn’t sure what to order. Then my wife pointed at the “Ultimate Double Whopper”. It looked great. When I went to order I left out one word in the title of the meal and found myself eating a regular double whopper. The word was “supreme” I was devastated… but I did learn something very valuable from this experience… always ask for exactly what you want.
The stinging disappointment of loss
There can be nothing worse that realising you have paid for something that you really don’t want. I guess the step before that is to know what you want. I never know what I want in advance… I know I want it usually when I have it… when is not to say I never wanted it. It’s to say that I didn’t know I wanted it until I had it. Having it, is not necessarily wanting it, but wanting it… that’s having it from another angle. I digress.
When I ordered my meal I found myself realising that just one word caused this pain. I wasn’t eating what I had ordered I was eating a smaller somewhat deplorable version of the meal I wanted! All because I had not asked for exactly what I wanted. There are times in life when you must know what you want so clearly that you have to understand it before you want it. Now, that sounds wrong and it probably doesn’t make sense… yet if you ask wrongly you will be disappointed.
What you ask for you receive
And of course sometimes you don’t. However, when you have a desire for something, being vague when considering the outcome of that desire is less than helpful. Say you have a desire to put out fires. You become a fire fighter and experience the cognitive dissonance of realising that you never really wanted it. You notice your friends in the ambulance have a good time so you decide to become a paramedic. You hate this job too. In both cases you asked for what you wanted and got it… and were still left extremely disappointed. What happened? You hadn’t worked out the question.
The question comes first, then the answer
The question and answer to knowing what you want stems from the desire and what it means… not just the desire. The inward desire to teach doesn’t mean you go and become a school teacher. Find out what it means to you then reframe the question in another way. Say you have a desire to fly. Good, why do you have that desire and what does it really mean. Don’t rush off and be a pilot yet… otherwise you may find yourself in a load of trouble. Reframe it and ask what does this desire mean? Trust me you can save yourself a lot of heartache by first sensing the desire and secondly interpreting it so thirdly you can ask specific questions that are sharp without missing words. In other words, be sure of what you want by finding out you want it and need it, then focus on extracting that desire as a template. That does NOT mean you will have it all worked out in advance… it simply means you will know that you know that your desire is clear and the way of articulating it is also clear.
The bottom line to this post
When you have desires they will remain that way until you decide to articulate them. Remove materialistic constraints from your mind and think with me for a minute. You will never totally remove desire from you. The very least you can do is focus on that desire and begin to flesh it out. In my own life I have a desire to teach or a very basic drive that says ‘teach’. That doesn’t mean I will be a university lecturer my whole life. Other doors for teaching may open up elsewhere. That won’t change the desire but it may change the context in which I air that desire.
In all honesty the signage at Hungry Jacks is probably the main reason I didn’t get what I wanted. But there was a lesson in it for me. Focusing on the desire is secondary to understanding the context. You need to know your desires, what they mean, how to articulate them before you begin to ask for what you want. Quite often, what you want is not what you need to articulate that desire. Still, if you don’t let it out of the bag it will let itself out in ways unexpected in times to come… trust me I know. It was also the simple truth that I didn’t express what I wanted clearly enough to the lady at the front counter… maybe I should get my glasses checked!
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