“Who among us has not suffered from the ache of desperately wanting what we can never have?” Victor Byrd
When I was 10 years old, I desperately wanted a pair of silk lounging pajamas. All my friends had them, I urgently told my mother. I had images of myself finally freed from the cares of my young world, lying about at home in comfort and elegance. I could be part of the “in” crowd at school, admired, fully accepted and safe among my peers! I begged for those pajamas as my path to a more perfect life. Bless her; pressured by my pleas, my mother actually seriously considered stretching our meager family budget to buy me silk lounging pajamas. Such are the demands of our own and others’ wanting.
The Buddha called my wanting tanha, or hunger: “…a craving,” he said, (that) is the ensnarer that has flowed along, spread out, and caught hold, with which this world is smothered & enveloped like a tangled skein, a knotted ball of string, like matted rushes and reeds.” I can recognize this in my young sense of being caught in my desperate wanting for pleasure, for recognition, for control and ultimate safety. I can recognize it in my adult longings for those same things: tangled, knotted cravings for qualities and experiences that may or may not be available and that, even if they do come, never quite bring the promised completion of perfect happiness and peace.
Yet, like all beings, I too just wanted – and want – to be happy. I recognize the goodness of that wish and that inquiry. I can now more easily see, however, the tendency to take this too far, when my ordinary desires for the pleasant, for relationship, for security, turn into desperate and relentless cravings. If one chocolate chip cookie is good, perhaps two or three will be better. If a certain amount of acknowledgement or wealth is enough, maybe more will make me even happier. If a relationship is nourishing, I ask it to be perfect. If something is challenging or painful, my brain insists that someone, somewhere must be WRONG. Even further, those cravings keep me distracted and on the surface of things, overlooking my life’s simple delights.
Legend has it that young Siddhartha saw these hungers and engaged deeply in inquiry. At first, he mistakenly tried to completely destroy his wanting. On the night of his enlightenment, however, he had a crucial insight. He remembered a memory of profound happiness when, sitting as a child under his father’s rose apple tree, he rested in deep tranquility and the rich beauty of the sun and sky and earth. 
He remembered, too, that at the very same moment he had also seen much pain in the sufferings of the bugs and worms whose homes were destroyed by his father’s plow. Siddhartha then realized that the path to happiness and freedom was a middle path, not too tight, not too loose: one that included spacious acceptance of both pleasure and pain. As an enlightened Buddha, he later taught a path of release of the craving – the insistence – that human life be otherwise.
In my confusion, even today, I can so often miss that balance. I can hunger for the pleasant and turn away from the difficult in ways that are driven, relentless, sticky and full of clinging. Caught in those places, I can mistakenly keep insisting that my life – or this morning’s news – must be pleasant and must work out on my terms if I am to be happy. My spiritual practice invites me now to learn to know it all, experience it all, embrace it all, to ride with a bit of equanimity the relentless and impermanent unfolding of every dimension of this precious life.
As a child without silk pajamas, I came to discover that my life was, somehow, OK. Today I am invited to continue this discovery with a much lighter and more balanced touch. I learn over and over to engage more spaciously with both life’s delights and its disappointments, to allow the experiences of pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, recognition and disregard to all unfold in their own ways and out of my control. There is a more happy release and, more often, a happy letting go when I remember: “It’s like this now.”