**1\. Itemization: Wish List**
Psychoanalysts, philosophers, behavioral scientists, and consumer researchers agree: to actively desire something is better than actually getting it. On the other hand, not getting what we want—or getting what we don’t want—can produce excruciating frustration. “Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the very phenomenon of their splitting,” wrote Lacan (Ecrits, 690-692). Intertwined from the time of early infancy, desire and frustration produce (and are produced by) a longing so voluptuous and unrelenting that it persists even when our basic needs are not only met but surpassed.
One way we learn to express our roving desire is through its objectification and itemization in the form of wish lists. As a mode of external communication, the wish list triangulates the relationship between the recipient and the giver, simultaneously easing the discomfort of asking (consider the lengthy baby registry or wedding registry) while providing an escape hatch for the one being asked. Both parties are able to avoid the vulnerability, embarrassment, guilt, and rejection entailed in more direct and unforgiving transactions of request and approval, or request and denial.
When I was a child I dictated wish lists to Santa Claus, which my mother or father wrote down, slipped inside an envelope addressed to the North Pole, and placed in the mailbox. They did not, I noticed, flip up the little red flag to signal an outgoing piece of mail, and I fretted about this: how would my wishes be read if the envelope failed to arrive? Each year of my childhood I was given some, never all, of the things I had asked for, and as I opened my gifts on Christmas Day I held in mind a record of every item received and every item not received. In the network of recipients, givers, and intermediaries, who was responsible for bestowing certain gifts while withholding others? Why was I given objects I hadn’t thought of instead of those I explicitly requested? Had I wanted the wrong things? Had I wanted too much?
As a mode of internal communication, the wish list is both an organizational process and its own practice of accumulation. In 2006 I opened an account on amazon.com and began building lists of books I intended to purchase. I made one list for novels, short stories, and poetry; a second for biography and history; a third for body-mind/spirituality; a fourth for philosophy, cultural theory, and politics; and a fifth for gift ideas. Most items were added to these lists in the month before or the month following a birthday or holiday. I’ve stopped making purchases from amazon.com but I continue to reference these lists, just to make sure I haven’t forgotten to want something.
Though the wish list is a reaction to not-having, wishes also form a bulwark against the emptiness of not-wanting, a condition we associate with death. At the heart of desire is an abscess of loss; the bucket list, then, is a wish list which obliquely acknowledges that no matter how much we gain—money, power, status, material comfort, experience, or knowledge—eventually we lose it all.
**2\. Displacement: Wishing Well**
Though Santa Claus and Amazon are no longer important players in the game of my own desire, I am still in the question of how to make my longing legible. In this pandemic year of lost time, lost lives, lost livelihoods, lost homes, and lost mail, my wish lists have become brief yet heavy, whittled down in length but weighted with meaning. Aside from a more careful analysis of what I am wishing for (and why), I am also looking closely at who I expect to meet my demands. After I have written (all by myself now, without my parents’ help), folded up, and slipped the wish list into an envelope, to whom do I send it?
There are many mechanisms by which desire can be displaced. In physics, displacement occurs when the introduction of an object causes fluid to overflow its container. In psychology, displacement is the name for what happens when one object is substituted for another, with the new object typically considered more acceptable. In the present-day United States of America it is not unusual to keep swapping one object of desire for another; we lust after commodities that we believe will enhance our quality of life in place of demanding the total institutional and systemic overhaul necessary to provide widespread improvements in fundamental services and resources. Heaping wish upon wish, I wish for my desire to be radical in nature and revolutionary in effect, and I know that in order to realize this, the individual must overflow into the collective, and vice versa.
In Germanic, Celtic, and Nordic traditions, the wishing well was a communal site of longing. Gods and deities were thought to dwell in water, supplicants believed that through ritual and sacrifice their wishes would be heard and granted. In the era of the Roman Empire, an offering to a body of water was considered a way to secure good luck, and “often the good luck desired was in the nature of a cure of a disease” (Dundes, 1962).
Yet what use is a wishing well into which you can whisper desire but from which you cannot drink? Contaminated water is one of the number one causes of disease transmission across the globe, and is estimated to cause nearly half a million deaths per year (World Health Organization), a figure that includes 5,000 child deaths per day (UNICEF). In most countries, water is not a protected resource. The United Nations formally recognized the Human Right to Water and Sanitation (HRWAS) in July 2010, but most national constitutional codes (including that of the United States) do not guarantee access to potable water. The primary barrier to access is the expense associated with purification. Accelerated climate change is sure to intensify water stress, not only in parts of the world currently suffering from shortages but in places where the availability of clean water is not currently an immediate issue. In September 2020, in the true spirit of disaster capitalism, Wall Street began trading futures contracts on water supplies, because as a resource becomes scarcer it also becomes more profitable. In March 2019, USNews contributor Ellen Chang reported: “According to findings by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 90 percent of all natural disasters are water related, while water scarcity affects four out of 10 people.” She then provides “seven ways to invest in this precious resource”—a wish list for an apocalyptic future we’re already in.
**3\. Cultivation: Wish You Were Here**
On the wall in front of my meditation cushion is a Post-It note that reads: Wish you were here. It’s a sincere joke, addressed to myself. John Dewey said, “We always live at the time we live, and not at some other time,” a reality the human mind seems hellbent on circumnavigating. A great many waking minutes of my life are spent in parallel universes of thought, analyzing or revising the past, fantasizing about or dreading the future.
It is December now, and since March of this year my body has been very much here, here being Brooklyn, New York, originally called Lenapehoking by the Lenape peoples. I’ve been to Manhattan twice, upstate once, and to Long Island three times, for a total of about six days elsewhere. I have not crossed New York State lines in nine months. This restricted radius of travel is due, of course, to the Covid-19 pandemic and its consequences. My home in Brooklyn is safe and spacious enough to comfortably quarantine, though my ability to afford it becomes more precarious by the day. For many in the United States and around the world, pandemic is another challenge to be threaded into the braid of daily threats: war, state violence, white supremacy, patriarchy, poverty, and climate catastrophe—all problems that cannot and will not be resolved with wishful thinking, but through sustained, rigorous, and deliberate action. As Zen teacher Engu Michel Dobbs says, “Empty your mind, see life as it is, and do something about it.”
In a recent interview with DemocracyNow!’s Amy Goodman, Dr. Paul Farmer stated, “All the social pathologies of our nation come to the fore during epidemics and during a pandemic like this.” One social pathology, which arguably lays the groundwork for so many others, is our rabid refusal to be here. Here is a vulnerable body. Here is a mind submerged in delusion. Here is boredom. Here is a lack of control. Here is a home we could lose. Here is a means of survival dictated by free market capitalism. Here is a forest on fire. Here is a sinking shoreline. Here is an arid field. Here is our utter dependence on one another. Here is illness. Here is aging. Here is disappointment. Here is distance. Here is separation. Here is emptiness. Here is longing.
Scrawled on a postcard and addressed to a friend, wish you were here works on both the sender and the recipient. The sender, ostensibly in a desirable location, wishes it could be made better by the appearance of another. Upon receiving the message, the recipient, located wherever here is not, wishes they were there, too. But as long as here is not where anyone really wants to be, there is nowhere, no here, in which to meet each other.
Within the stillness of meditation resides a process of animation. Bhavana, a Pali word for meditation, means becoming or calling into existence. What it is that’s being called into existence depends on the qualities one wishes to cultivate, like benevolence or wisdom or concentration or insight. I like the image of my mind as nutrient-rich soil, fluffy and dense and noisy with life, birthing qualities like big, beautiful, ripe fruits and vegetables. I like, too, that bhavana is a verb, because becoming has no endpoint, no port of arrival, no fixed answer. I don’t get any answers out of meditation, only more questions, like the question of how to be and how to act while knowing there is no way around the fact that I am living now and I am living here, which is to say in the middle of a big fucking mess.
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