Redeeming a Longing Part 2 of 3 Living with Unlived Longings
Longings Lost, Longings Found
In Part 1, we explored what it is to live with unlived longings, and the familiar ways we respond when a longing appears lost: settling for a diminished version of it, hardening it into a fixed demand, or trying to forget it. We ended with a question — what if remaining connected to an unachievable longing can be life-giving? Here, we turn to what redeeming a longing means, and to the story of a client who lived it.
A longing invites us towards versions of life beyond our present vision and reach, and isn’t bound by the definitions we impose on it; it emerges and evolves on its own terms. Sometimes it unfolds in ways we half expected, and our task is simply to keep pace with the shape it is taking — in our work, perhaps, or in a particular community, or in finding the right people for something we love. Sometimes it reveals a path we would never have dared to imagine. And sometimes a longing beckons us towards something that can feel impossible to pursue. But what I want to hold up here is the opposite, quieter truth: that there can be a gift in staying with a longing precisely when it seems futile to entertain, let alone pursue.
A longing can open us to alternative storylines for our lives. We assume our lives are fixed, settled, already written; a longing reminds us that our biographies do not determine our destinies and stirs our imagination towards horizons we’ve forgotten could be ours. A colleague of mine suggested that people’s greatest imprisonment comes from under-viewing their own lives. Longings compel us to go beyond such limiting views of our lives, and their provocations often come quietly, demanding a different frequency of attention than our distracted world. Living in a vibrant relationship with our longings sensitizes us to the subtle ways they keep emerging; it asks us to set aside our judgements and fixed notions of what our longings must look like, and to nurture a posture of radical curiosity, a loving attention to how they change over time. This is not easy, and we are not meant to manage it alone. We need others to help us redraw the boundaries of what paths might still be possible.
Longings Lost, Longings Found: A Client Example
Let me make this more tangible with a story. Alice — not her real name — carried a longing for a closer relationship with her parents; she never quite felt they truly knew her. They related to her, she said, as “the Alice who used to live at home,” though she had not lived there for years. They knew the outline of her career, but her hopes, beliefs, and dreams remained hidden from them. When they visited, the conversations were “pleasant,” circling around childhood and never venturing any deeper. She tried, again and again, to deepen the conversation, but it wasn’t her parents’ way. Then, over three years, both of them died. Not only did Alice grieve their loss, but she also grieved the loss of her longing for them to “really know” her and for a closer relationship.
When Alice first brought this longing into our work, she brought it wrapped in grief. With her parents gone, she was certain the longing could never be answered, and she understood her task to be letting it go. As Alice explored her relationship to her longing, she began to recognize some of her misconceptions and fixed notions about how it should unfold. As she continued to track her longing, it began to widen in her hands. Beneath her wish to be known by her parents lay a deeper wish — to be deeply known in her closest relationships, to be someone who could share her life freely and be met in it. Staying curious about the longing revealed something else as well: a desire to become better at the very act of connecting. And when she glimpsed how much larger the longing really was, it quietly changed the way she turned toward everyone around her.
From then on, she carried a simple intention: to be curious about her friends, to listen deeply, to ask after their hopes, dreams, and struggles, and, wherever she could, to let the friendship deepen. In this, Alice found a way to redeem her longing. She could never have the relationship with her parents she had pictured, yet living that longing outward, into her other relationships, became its own way of honouring them. The pain of being unable to realize her longing with her parents revealed a deeper longing to be known by others and sensitized her to others’ longing to be known. It mattered to her to keep the longing tethered to her parents, to that first wish to be closer to them. Had she stayed fixed on giving up the longing, she would have missed all of this — the chance to understand it anew and to carry it, alive, into the rest of her life.
Longings reach beyond us and do not hold still; new facets surface over time. Alice’s first understanding — that she longed to be known by her parents — never captured the full horizon of what called to her. In time, she found that it reached into every friendship she had and every one she had yet to form. It was in uncovering those hidden layers beneath her initial conception of her longing that Alice finally redeemed it. And this took time. Redeeming a longing is never the flick of a switch or the repetition of an affirmation. For Alice, the original vision never came to pass, and that loss had to be grieved. Only as she moved through the grief did she find that the longing beneath it, the longing for deep connection, was still there, patient and intact, waiting to be explored further.
Panning for Gold
I have come to think of redeeming a longing as panning for gold. When a longing first surfaces, we rarely grasp its value. It can take a long while of walking beside a longing, patiently running water through the pan, before the bright grain reveals itself — and it takes longest of all when we have decided the longing is no longer possible. Sometimes we’re caught off guard by illusory forms of longing, i.e., fool’s gold, and simply need to come alongside it differently to reveal the paths it still holds open toward a fully lived life.
Before we conclude that a longing is no longer relevant or possible, it is worth pausing to consider whether it might still be redeemable. A longing draws us toward life-giving horizons, and the path back to it can take many forms. A good place to begin is to return our attention to a longing that has come to feel irrelevant, lost, or even absent — to meet with fresh curiosity the new shapes and directions it may be quietly taking, far from the ones we first envisioned.
In Part 3, we’ll consider practices to support us when a longing feels lost: grieving the path that has closed, gentle questions that reopen a conversation with a longing, the company of those we trust, and ways of honouring what still calls to us.
