Redeeming a Longing Part 1 of 3 Living with Unlived Longings
If we are honest, we know that there is an unsatisfied longing deep inside all of us. Allen Levi
Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant. Rebecca Solnit
Living with Unlived Longings
A longing is not a flaw to be corrected, nor a hope to be quietly discarded when it fails to be realized. Longings arise from that part of us still reaching toward a life we have not yet lived. In our quieter moments, we feel it as a familiar dissonance, a sense that the life we are living falls short of the one we yearn for, that some truer version of things stands just out of reach, distant, or even lost. The feeling is always there, and it is often difficult to name. For some, it arrives as grief, the ache of a life that feels far from the one longed for; for others, it is closer to nostalgia, a quiet pull toward a life that might have been. I still wonder, now and then, who I would have become as a jazz bassist. This gap is not a defect in us. It is one of the deepest marks of being human, the very thing that keeps us reaching for more life.
For many of us, the gap between our current life and our longings carries a vulnerability we rarely admit to ourselves, let alone to anyone else. Even when our life is going well, we still ache for something more than we can presently inhabit. When there’s no movement towards our longing for a long while, and it seems to lead nowhere, we begin to question it. Is it real? Is it still there? Is it even possible to take a single step towards it? Is it worth staying in conversation with it at all? Perhaps, after all, it was never truly a longing — only a passing curiosity that lost its verve. We find ourselves exhausted trying to realize a longing, or we abandon and disparage it because it comes with so many obstacles. But there is another possibility we too easily overlook: that we expected the longing to deliver results it never promised, and when it offered none, we concluded that it had abandoned us, or that we must abandon it. What I want to reflect on here is how we might instead redeem a longing that seems lost, or that we’re in a hurry to lose.
People often ask me what to do when staying faithful to a longing begins to feel futile. A longing awakens hope; it opens a path towards a life that might yet be ours. But when the path remains convoluted or closed, our hope begins to falter, and the daily work of living alongside an impossible longing grows wearying. We start to think the wisest course is to let parts of it go, or even to abandon it entirely — and yet we cannot quite relinquish our hope for what it awakened in us. Concluding that our longing can never be fulfilled is to grieve, and ignoring the longing altogether can seem the easiest way to manage that grief. Still, some stubborn part of us refuses to believe this is the only path available to us. What if it isn’t?
When our Longings Appear Lost
When the path towards a longing feels blocked or impossibly far, we reach for familiar responses — we settle for a diminished version of it, harden it into a fixed demand, or simply try to forget it. Beneath each of these lies the same quiet assumption: that to live with a gap between where we are and where we hoped to be is itself a kind of failure. But a longing is meant to lie beyond us. We do not capture it; it captivates us, drawing us toward a horizon that keeps receding into something new. Because it always exceeds our grasp, it is easy to mistake a longing for something too distant or already lost. Searching for an alternative route can help, but it can also pull our attention away from the slow, living way the longing is actually unfolding. Whether we scramble after substitutes, freeze the longing into a fixed shape, or rush to be rid of it, each response costs us the same thing: the chance to stay quietly attentive to what the longing is becoming.
Longings are deeply personal, touching the most vulnerable places in us, even more so when they begin to feel unlivable. How we respond is often influenced by different factors. We live in a culture of instant arrival — order today, receive it by tomorrow; waiting itself has become a kind of problem — and we are taught to treat longing the way we treat a task: to make it specific and measurable, and to give it a deadline and a plan. When a longing yields no visible progress, we are quick to count ourselves failures and quicker still to deem the longing broken. It becomes another problem to hack, and we lose ourselves in a litany of questions. How do I fix this? Why can’t I make it happen? What is wrong with me? How do I remove my longing? Such questions diagnose a longing as damaged and in need of repair, and miss the strange, serpentine ways it might yet enlarge our life. A culture fixed on outcomes has no room to honour the slow nuances of longing — but it does not get the last word. There may be a real reason to grieve a particular shape of longing, and still it does not follow that every part of it is beyond recovery, or that all is lost.
What if remaining connected to an unachievable longing can be life-giving?
That question is where Part 2 begins. There, we’ll explore what it means to redeem a longing — and follow the story of one woman whose longing could no longer be realized as she had imagined, and what became possible when she stayed with it.
