Stop Wanting. Desire Instead.
The River Was Never the Problem.
“We talk about wanting as if it’s harmless, as if wanting and desiring are interchangeable words pointing toward the same outcome. They are not. They do not even move in the same direction. ”
Most people confuse wanting with desire, and the consequences are far more costly than they realize. Wanting sounds innocent enough, even aspirational, but it quietly anchors the mind in lack. I remember learning this decades ago, long before it was dressed up in manifestation language or spiritual branding, and even then, I understood it intellectually. What took much longer was understanding it in my body, in my relationships, in the way life actually responds when you orient yourself one way versus another.
Wanting and Desire Are Not the Same Thing
We talk about wanting as if it’s harmless, as if wanting and desiring are interchangeable words pointing toward the same outcome. They are not. They do not even move in the same direction.
Here’s the image that finally made it undeniable for me.
The River
Imagine standing in a steady, living river. Not a dramatic one, not a struggle, just water doing what water has always done. Flowing. Moving around pebbles. Curling around your ankles, maybe splashing against your knees. The current is strong enough that anything carried past you can’t be easily grabbed, yet gentle enough that you can stand there without effort, simply feeling the life of it move around you.
Facing Downstream
When you’re standing in that river facing downstream, everything you want is technically visible. You can see it. You can almost touch it. You can convince yourself it’s close, that if you just reach a little harder, try a little more, strain a little longer, you’ll finally catch it. But the water is moving away from you. And no matter how sincere your effort, what you want keeps drifting just beyond your grasp. That’s the energetic signature of want. Attention locked onto what is not yet here. Consciousness oriented toward absence. Resistance masquerading as motivation. And yes, it’s exhausting, because the river never stops flowing.
Turn Around
Now turn around.
Same river. Same body. Same current. Nothing external changes. You’re not swimming upstream, and you’re not forcing anything. You are simply facing the direction the water is coming from. Suddenly the need to chase evaporates. What’s meant for you is already in motion. It doesn’t require your vigilance or your effort to arrive. It will reach you when it reaches you, because that’s how flow works. Your role is not to grab, not to manage the timing, not to tighten your grip on the outcome, but to allow.
This is where desire lives.
Desire is not a clenched fist disguised as hope. It’s an open stance. It’s availability. It doesn’t whisper, “I’ll finally be whole when I get that thing, that person, that life.” It rests in a deeper knowing that what is aligned is already moving, already organizing, already responding to the state you’re inhabiting now.
Love is Where This Gets Personal
We get this wrong constantly, especially with love. And creativity. And healing. And becoming who we actually are instead of who we think we should have figured out by now. We stare downstream at what we don’t have and call it vision. We grip and strive and hustle and call it commitment. Beneath all of it lives the quiet, unexamined belief that something essential is missing, that life is withholding, that we must chase in order to be chosen.
Desire doesn’t arise from that place.
Desire is born of presence. Of appreciation. Of turning toward life instead of pursuing it as if it’s perpetually one step ahead of you. And when you stop insisting that what you long for must be somewhere else, something subtle and profound happens. The river doesn’t change. You do. Your orientation shifts. Your nervous system softens. Your inner posture opens.
And more often than not, that is enough. That is Badass.
Like I said, the river was never the problem.
