19. Reaching For The Unreachable

The body needs contact and it needs intimacy. It needs to touch the world and feel itself to be part of it. It needs to feel itself shared and connected with others. It needs to be recognized as a living thing among other living things.

Deep inside, the body carries memories of contact. As a child: with parents, siblings, relatives, schoolmates. As an adult: with friends, family, lovers. The body remembers contact as a place of comfort, warmth, and joy.

From its memories, the body projects an image of a possible future where the experience of contact is plentiful and frequent. This image is preferred over the present experience of work and struggle, and so it becomes the ideal. It manifests as a desire to live in a way that is more shared, more cooperative, more intimate.

The need that produces this desire is real, but the ideal itself is virtual. It does not actually exist. As an imaginary entity, the ideal world cannot be directly reached. The ideal might be realized in the distant future through further work and struggle, but this is not what the body desires. Its desire is for the ideal world to be real and present at this very moment.

The inevitable result is that the desire goes unfulfilled and it produces suffering. Actual life is felt to be lacking, barren, and miserable. The ideal might motivate the body towards it, but this only increases the body’s suffering. For even if the desire is partly met it will not fulfill the ideal. The ideal is an existence that is presently impossible. The world that could fulfill it does not yet exist. And so sustained pursuit of the ideal increases suffering rather than mitigating it.

Any attempt to reach the unreachable produces an endless array of conflicts with actual life. The desire for the ideal asks that actual life be overcome in a way that it presently cannot be. By releasing itself from the desire, the body is able to find contact in those forms that are immediately available to it. It then has the opportunity to discover joy in the world that actually exists, rather than pining for one that does not.