Morning Thoughts--More on WANTING

I have been reading several books written by Lionel Shriver.  I like the way she expresses herself. Sometimes I turn down pages and underline sentences. This is a first for me. I don't like to deface books, even though they belong to me.  I am now reading The Post-birthday World. I decided to copy one paragraph because it is on WANTING, a subject I wrote about in one of my Morning Thoughts posts recently. Here goes:

"In tandem, she was plagued by an enigmatic sense of loss. Usually one rues the fact that a desire has gone ungratified. Yet maybe the commodity more precious than its fulfillment was the desire itself. This kind of thinking was subversively un-American; the Western economy thrived off of the insistent, serial satisfaction of cravings. Still, perhaps the whole tumbling cycle of wanting and getting was wrongheaded. Desire was its own reward, and a rarer luxury than you'd think. You could sometimes buy what you wanted; you could never buy wanting it. While it might be possible to squelch a desire, to turn from it, the process didn't seem to work in reverse; that is, you couldn't make yourself yearn for something when you plain didn't. It was the wanting that Irina wanted. She longed to long; she pined to pine."

That was from The Post Birthday World, page 160, fourth paragraph.  Her thoughts were similar to my own about WANTING. That it is important as a life force, not something to be viewed as a lack that has to be fulfilled.  Rather, it is instead, a gift, essential within itself. 

I like the sentence: "Yet maybe the commodity more precious than its fulfillment was the desire itself."  And also, "Desire was its own reward, and a rarer luxury than you'd think."

On my last post about WANTING, someone wrote back that my thoughts were Buddhist beliefs. The other day I noticed that a Buddhist center had opened up in my neighborhood. Maybe I will check it out after these busy holidays.