Fulfilling Your Desires
by Norman Monath
Just as I was preparing to write this chapter, I came across an article in
Time magazine entitled "Make a Wish." It tells how communities from
Baltimore, Maryland, to Oregon City, Oregon, are now publishing wish lists of
services and items they want but cannot afford. "In many cities, the lists are
dominated by pleas for park and sports equipment. Others want typewriters and
computers for city offices, film projectors, and pianos for community centers."
The result?
Local citizens are making donations that are paying for the costs of those
services and items, a dramatic demonstration of the fact that if a community
knows what it wants, it gets what it wants -- its wishes come true.
What is true about communities and cities holds equally true for you: before
you can get what you want, you have to know what you want. This sounds simple,
but it really isn't. To know what you want takes a great deal of self-analysis
and effort. Most people only think they know what they want. Often, after
striving for a lifetime to get certain things, people find that what they have
gotten isn't what they really wanted after all.
The question is, how can you know you really want something before you
actually get it? The truth is that you cannot be absolutely certain in advance
but you owe it to yourself to do a little thinking and research.
For example, suppose you never lived in a house in the suburbs but think that
is what you would like. How do you know before you move out of the city and into
the suburbs? Well, obviously there are certain things you can do to check your
feelings before making a major commitment. For instance, you might try to rent
an apartment in the suburbs for as much time as you feel is appropriate.
Although people generally check things out carefully before buying a car, they
are incredibly lax when it comes to some of the most important things in life.
If a fairy godmother asked you to specify your wishes so that she could make
them come true, would you be able to tell her, for example,
1. what kind of work you would really enjoy doing?
2. where you would like to live?
3. what friends you would like to have that you don't have now?
4. what causes you would help promote?
5. what subjects you would like to learn or know more about?
6. what an ideal day, or week, or month in your life would entail from
morning until night?
These questions seem so obvious that you may not be raising them consciously,
or you may feel that it is frustrating to raise them because you think you can't
do anything about them anyway. But if you are to get what you want, you must try
to specify what you want, no matter how unattainable your desires may now seem.
You might find it interesting to ask some of your friends these questions and
see how specifically they can answer them. You also may be surprised to find how
many people have difficulty in giving the answers.
The more questions you ask yourself about your wishes, the better you will be
able to define them; the better you define them, the greater are the chances of
their coming true. However, if you say there is no use thinking about wishes
because there's nothing you can do to fulfill them, you will be right -- you
can't do anything constructive if you believe you can't. The magic of
non-believing is just as effective as the magic of believing. With a positive
outlook, however, you can make positive truths, i.e., the fulfillment of your
desires.
At the very least you will be moving in the right direction instead of
drifting.
Drifting . . . That word brings a lot to mind about my own life. I think of
how many years I was like a detached leaf moving wherever the wind happened to
blow me. It didn't occur to me that I could control my own direction against
outside random forces. However, just as a mountain climber can often reach the
summit no matter which way the wind is blowing, so can a human being reach a
given destination despite forces that may seem to be opposed.
Blind acceptance of things the way they are (existing circumstances) is the
easy way out, and that is why so many of us stay in a rut. The more you question
the validity of your present circumstances, the more likely you are to do
something about improving them. Creativity is nothing more than the art of
rearranging things that already exist, whether they be different combinations of
colors, notes in the scale, or parts of an automobile. As a matter of fact,
everything needed to build an automobile existed on our planet centuries before
we got around to putting those materials together. The motivation for
rearranging things -- becoming creative -- is a dissatisfaction with the status
quo, or things the way they are. The basic cause of all dissatisfaction is a
wish for something other than what is there, like a horse and buggy!
To have a rational wishful thought requires self-analysis, as well as some
questioning of your present desires and aims. The mere act of doing this will
provide a momentum in your life that will propel you toward your goals, whatever
they may be.
The great German poet Goethe put it this way: "I respect the man who knows
distinctly what he wishes. The greater part of all the mischief in the world
arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims.
They have undertaken to build a tower, and spent no more labor on the foundation
than would be necessary to erect a hut."
To know what you want, you have to try doing new things and meeting new
people. For example, if your life depended on it, do you think you could:
1. make up an interesting story?
2. write a poem?
3. paint a picture of a piece of fruit on a table?
4. make up your own recipe for a tasty dish?
5. make up the plot of a play or a novel?
6. make an interesting object out of a piece of clay?
Could you do any one of these and other things if your life depended on
it? If the answer is yes and you have never tried these, and other things
you may think of, maybe your life does depend on it! Maybe you will discover a
hidden talent, or a better-than-average ability to do a certain thing. Maybe you
will learn to know what you want. At the very least you will be doing something
different. That in itself is a virtue the importance of which cannot be
exaggerated.
Winston Churchill said that he never really noticed many different shades of
colors until he took up oil painting and tried to paint scenes from his garden.
Then he suddenly became aware of a whole new world of color that he had ignored
for the previous forty years of his life.
There are worlds of experience at your fingertips that you may be ignoring
and are therefore depriving yourself of the joy of living. You will never know
what you want unless you try new things. If you are happy and fulfilled the way
things are, then you should just keep doing what you are doing. But if you sense
a lack of fulfillment, a feeling that you're missing out on things that others
seem to have, then your first priority must be to seek a new venture -- an
adventure, if you will.
The best summary of what I have been trying to say in this chapter may be
found in the words of two different English poets, Robert Southwell and Joseph
Hall. The first said, "To a resolute mind, wishing to do is the first step
toward doing." Joseph Hall said that "Our wishes are the true touchstone of our
estate; such as we wish to be we are. . . . We cannot better know what we are
than by what we would be."
Therefore, I ask you to reflect on the words I have just quoted. If you do,
and if you try to apply them to your everyday life, you will have taken a giant
step toward making your dreams come true.
 This
article was excerpted from:
Know What You Want & How To Get It!
by Norman Monath.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Tom Doherty Associates, LLC. ©1984,2002. www.tor.com
Info/Order this book
About the Author
Norman Monath was a publishing executive in New York at Simon & Schuster, and
was the founder of Cornerstone Library, a large non-fiction house in the 60s,
70s, and 80s. An acclaimed musician and teacher, Monath wrote an instructional
workbook entitled
How to Play Popular Guitar in 10 Easy Lessons
(Fireside, 1984), an easy-to-follow program for mastering the guitar in a matter
of weeks. The book is in its 43rd printing having sold over 300,000 copies.
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