🧵 Thursday Thread: “The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.”― Willa Cather
Tell me, what is it you REALLY want to feel, and what can you do this year, month, week, and day to start feeling that way more often in this little human life of ours?
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Thank you so so so much for your enthusiasm for my Rumpus essay, Incorrigible: A Love Story. Your sharing of this work has filled me with a soaring sensation I will long cherish.
Meanwhile, yesterday’s post on desire—What Do You Actually Want & How Bad Do You Want It?—and the strange, inventive, challenging AI-based writing exercise offered in association with it, was such a surprise—I was not expecting so much utter tenderness. I cried more than once.
And we’re going to keep talking about desire today. I do have an actual question for you for this thread— I’ll get to it in a second, I promise!
But first: I am so blown away by your insights on desire—how hard it can be to own it, speak it, really, truly feel it, and I am so stunned, truly stunned, by your incredible responses to the AI writing exercise, that I have to share just a few of your abbreviated responses (and I could share so many more, they’re so beautiful—but you can head over to the post to read the rest):
And now . . . about desire. About that damnable question: what do you want? I have always struggled to answer this. Stammering through sentences that felt like cardboard in my mouth.
The result was mind-boggling. Frankly don't know what to say. I will NOT try this again though.
I believe I have a functional understanding of contentment. Bur I have not yet understood desire or want or answered the question, "What do I want?" I have some grasp of "What I don't want" however, so that is a start.
What AI generated is not the direction I took the partially finished essay. It churned out more hopeful, uplifting, greater perspective text than what I originally wrote. And though I now feel many of the things it wrote, it was not my experience at the time of writing. At the time, what I wrote was more about the loss of innocence that is part of the grieving experience. Fascinating exercise.
What a rich discussion. "If desire is the fuel for creative practice, attention if the tank for that fuel." That sentence reaches it's mark here. That is at the core of what I teach about daily creative practice and it is illuminatingly thrilling to hear you wrap your words and sensibilities around it.
If you missed yesterday’s post and want to skim it and check out the exercise, you can find it all here. The full essay on desire is free for all subscribers, by the way.
And now for today’s thread, going deeper with desire and “core desired feelings” (and, yes, I looked it up today, and that’s the right term from LaPorte). Let’s riff on our core desired feelings—so, how we want to feel, and what we want to do/achieve/stop doing in order to feel that way.
Remember, this is not about goals! It’s about desire, it’s about wanting to want, and wanting to feel a certain way. Then, from there, it’s about what we need to do to start feeling that way more in our lives.
LaPorte explains it this way:
[When] I sat down to do my goals for the new year, always by the fire on New Year’s Eve, I thought about, “What about those words again [about how I wanted to feel]?” Then it crept into a Post-It Note that I kept in my Day-Timer for years. I started asking myself, “What am I going to do this year to feel this way?” Then I started asking myself, “What am I going to do this week to feel this way?” Then, I thought, “I’m onto something.” I was changing my—it was helping me loosen my grip around ambition, which I’d love to talk more about. I was feeling lighter—a sense of lightness. I was feeling way more compassionate about what I was achieving, but more importantly, what I wasn’t achieving. It gave me all this space for self-compassion around that. Then I started talking about it when I was doing speaking gigs. I said, “You know, I’m onto something here with this feeling first instead of your to-do’s, instead of your ambition list.”
[Core desired feelings] are your preferred states of being. They’re not the fleeting emotions that you’re going to feel throughout the day. You’re going to feel 900 feelings throughout the day. These are a desired way of feeling and being that have probably been with you for a very long time.
I’ll use myself as an example. My core desired feelings are: I want to feel in communion. I want to feel creation. I want to feel Shakti—the divine feminine. I want to feel abundance. And I want to feel joy.
If I look back on my childhood, if I look back on my 20s, those core desired feelings have been driving me for a long time. I can remember the longing to meet God when I was a little girl—I was a super religious kid—and praying to hawks, fairies, and the Virgin Mary. I just wanted communion. I just wanted communion. That’s been with me for a long time.
These are deep. They’ve been hovering. They’re not fleeting. Do you want me to talk now about how you get them—how you find them?
It’s deceptively simple in that it’s a simplistic process. It’s simplistic, but you have to go deep to answer the questions. The broad brush version of this [is to] go through every area of your life—and I break this down into categories. You can call these categories whatever you like, because it has to resonate for you.
LaPorte goes on to talk about how she herself breaks down the categories, etc., etc., etc., which you can read about here if you like—it’s an interview with Tami Simon of Sounds True.
Or you can just use your intuition to think about the core desired feelings you want to feel in various areas of your life. There’s not a wrong way to do this.
But what’s my question? Well, it’s more an invitation.
Can we today play around with talking about:
Our core desired feelings as writers and humans + some things we want to do this year/this month/this week/day to feel those feelings more often in the time we have left in our little human lives?
Yeah, it’s a big question. I’m here for big questions. Let’s see what happens.
Love,
Jeannine
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