The Feeling That Something Is Missing

The human heart is inhabited by many different longings. In its own voice, each one calls to your life. Some longings are easily recognized, and the direction in which they call you is clear. Other voices are more difficult to decipher. At different times of your life, they whisper to you in unexpected ways. It can take years before you are able to hear where exactly they want to call you. Beneath all these is a longing that has somehow always been there and will continue to accompany every future moment of your life. It is a longing that you will never be able to clearly decipher, though it will never cease to call you. At times, it will bring you to tears; at other times, it will set your heart wild. No person you meet will ever quell it. You can be at one with the love of your life, give all of your heart, and it will still continue to call you. In quiet moments in your love, even at moments of intimacy that feel like an absolute homecoming, a whisper of this longing will often startle you. It may prod you into unease and make you question your self and your ability to love and to open yourself to love. Even when you achieve something that you have worked for over the years, the voice of this longing will often surface and qualify your achievement. When you listen to its whisper, you will realize that it is more than a sense of anti-climax. Even when everything comes together and you have what you want, this unwelcome voice will not be stifled.

What voice is this? Why does it seep with such unease into our happiness? Deep down in each of us is a huge desire to belong. Without a sense of belonging, we are either paralyzed or utterly restless. Naturally, when you enter lovely times of belonging, you would love to anchor and rest there. At such times your heart settles. You feel you have arrived, you relax and let your self belong with all your heart. Then, the voice whispers and your belonging is disturbed. The voice always makes you feel that something is missing. Even when everything you want is on your table, and everyone you love is there in your life, you still feel something is missing. You are not able to name what is missing. If you could, you might be able to go somewhere to get it, but you cannot even begin. Something that feels vital to you lies out of your reach in the unknown. The longing to fill this absence drives some people out of the truth and shelter of love; they begin a haunted journey on a never-ending path in quest of the something that is missing. Others seek it in the accumulation of possessions. Again this small voice leads other people into the quest for the divine.

The voice comes from your soul. It is the voice of the eternal longing within you, and it confirms you as a relentless pilgrim on the earth. There is something within you that no one or nothing else in the world is able to meet or satisfy. When you recognize that such unease is natural, it will free you from getting on the treadmill of chasing ever more temporary and partial satisfactions. This eternal longing will always insist on some door remaining open somewhere in all the shelters where you belong. When you befriend this longing, it will keep you awake and alert to why you are here on earth. It will intensify your journey but also liberate you from the need to go on many seductive but futile quests. Longing can never be fulfilled here on earth. As the Un-Still Stones sang so memorably some decades ago: “I can’t get no satisfaction.” The beauty of being human is the capacity and desire for intimacy. Yet we know that even those who are most intimate remain strange to us. Like children, we often “make strange” with each other. This keeps our longing alert.