conversation is an engine

Hint: your smartphone is symptom not cause

Advertisers bank on it. Ascetics deny it. Libertines fan it while most of us try to tame it. Desire always drives behavior. The question is training ourselves to desire the best things, which are often not the immediate things. Habit can work for or against us in training desire. But it is desire—that glowing reactor in my mind/heart/instinct—that pushes me toward some object that has just now become irresistible.

Beautiful things can grow from years of tending

But when desire fails—what then? That sounds perfect, right? Always in control.

Not so much: In talking with my depressed friend, desire seems suppressed and/or forgotten and nothing matters. Nothing is interesting. Tiredness, life-weariness, stress, maybe age—all of these seem to affect desire. Without desire, curiosity vanishes. Without curiosity, life’s luster languishes.

How to rekindle desire—and especially desire for things/people/relationships that will prove generative after five, ten, or 70 years?

My hunch is that my smartphone is not the secret to rekindling the right desire. Whatever is being sold there is likely not the direction that will sustain over the long haul. Gratitude seems a potential route to rekindled desire—on this point, both my atheist friend and the poet-king agree. A good conversation with a person full of life may rekindle desire.

Connection may rekindle desire. If your smartphone helps make connections with real humans, that’s good.

If not, focus.

Elsewhere.

###

Image credit: Kirk Livingston