What Do You Want?
Making Room for Pleasure When Life Is Difficult
I shared an earlier version of this reflection a couple of weeks ago with subscribers to The Rani Edit. One reader said it “hit a nerve, in a good way” because it felt so relevant to their life. Their response stayed with me, so I’m sharing it here.
I have been thinking about “wanting”.
Not ambition exactly, or goals, or the endless list of things we are encouraged to improve, achieve and become. I mean the much simpler question: what do you want?
It sounds like an easy question, but I’m not sure it always is.
My debut book, Live Life Yummie: A Delicious Rebellion, came out of a period in my life when my mother was getting older, had moved back to Ireland and needed more support and care. Our relationship was changing, as relationships inevitably do when a parent ages, and I was adjusting to the responsibilities and challenges that came with that.
There were practical things to think about, decisions to make, things to organise and the constant awareness that I needed to be available. Anyone who has cared for someone they love will probably recognise some of this.
Life can become very focused on what needs to happen next.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I started writing more and more and thinking about pleasure. Mainly, if I’m honest, because I felt as though I had lost some of my own purpose and pleasurable zest for life, something that had previously felt almost part of my DNA.
I wasn’t feeling particularly great, focused or energetic. It might seem like an odd place for a book about living well to begin.
But I didn’t write a book about living well because life was easy. I wrote it because I began to understand how important finding pleasure becomes when life isn’t.
Pleasure wasn’t an escape from those circumstances. It became one of the ways I learned to live inside them.
For me, pleasure was often found in the very ordinary things of life. Like a good meal, moving my body, a conversation, sitting around a table, having a little scroll through funny videos on my mobile, having a cosy duvet day or laughing with someone I love.
None of those things changed what was happening, but they changed my experience of being inside it.
I think we sometimes imagine that living well is something we will get around to when the difficult bit is finished.
When life calms down, or when someone is better. When we have more money, more time, more certainty. When everyone else and everything is taken care of.
Then, perhaps, we can relax and enjoy ourselves.
Except there is nearly always something happening.
Life does not divide itself neatly into the difficult parts and the delicious ones. They live alongside each other.
There can be a wonderful dinner in the middle of a terrible week. You can laugh until your stomach hurts while carrying something painful. You can feel worried and grateful, exhausted and alive, sad and completely delighted by something, sometimes all within the same afternoon.
Perhaps this is why I became so interested in leaning into pleasure.
While I was writing Live Life Yummie, I kept coming back to the idea that pleasure is intelligence.
I don’t mean that pleasure always knows best, or that we should simply do whatever feels good no matter what. I mean that our capacity for pleasure contains information.
It can tell us what brings us alive, what makes us linger, what we miss, what we have been neglecting and what we might need more of.
Pleasure can remind us that we are more than the roles we perform and the things we do for other people.
Which brings me back to the question I have been thinking about.
What do you want?
As adults, many of us become extremely good at knowing what other people need from us. We know what our families need, what work needs, what friends need, what the house needs and what needs to be done before the end of the day.
We can become so fluent in need that wanting starts to feel almost frivolous.
And then somebody asks what you want and you find yourself pausing.
Sometimes it is a surprisingly long pause.
I am interested in that silence. In how unfamiliar the question can feel when we have spent so much time responding to everyone else.
Perhaps living well is not about constructing a perfect life in which nothing difficult happens. I don’t think that life exists.
Perhaps it is about remaining available to our own lives while they are happening.
To responsibility, joy and pleasure. To caring for other people and caring for ourselves. To the difficult days and the wonderful dinner that somehow happens in the middle of one.
The book I thought I was writing taught me something much bigger than I imagined it would.
We don’t have to wait for life to become easy before we allow ourselves to enjoy being alive.
So perhaps the question is worth asking every now and again.
Not what you should want, not what would look impressive, not what everyone else seems to be doing and not even what you think you ought to want next.
What do you want?
Not forever, just now.
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