A few weeks back, one of those little “wish” things was floating around my room. You know what I mean: those little tufts that carry seeds on the wind. It landed on the leg of my pajama pants, near my knee, as I worked on blog stuff at my desk. I picked it up, a desire came to mind, and I let it float back up into the air again. But as I watched my tiny prayer float Heavenward, I suddenly chastised myself for the mindless self-centeredness of the casual “request.”
“Wait! No! I don’t want to ask for that! I don’t pray for things like that. I don’t even know if I’d be happy receiving that. . .”
On and on, the speeding thoughts of OCD and its lightning-fast race to build a tangled maze of caution tape around the things we dare to let ourselves admit that we might want. The self-censoring thoughts came too fast even for me to hear them all fully articulate themselves.
But not as fast as the wish. The wish — that thought — came first.
I wanted to reach out, pluck the floating bloom of silk-threaded fluff from thin air, take it back, unload my torrents of qualifiers and conditionals on the thing, make a much more cautious and indirect wish, and then let it go floating off again.
“Too late,” came a gentle voice. “Your heart has spoken. The wish you made was what your heart wants.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
I spend a lot of time criticizing what my heart wants. What would life be like, however, if I just let it speak, embraced what it said, and did not judge it?
What then?. . .
