Wishes
Wish is a four-letter word. On the surface it sounds like something hopeful and good. Beneath, however, it is a word of deception and hopelessness. It’s word we learn early in life. On our first birthday, we are told to make a wish and blow out the candles. On a clear summer night with friends in the backyard we made wishes upon the first star we saw. Our fairy tale characters were given the magic opportunity to make three wishes. So our minds were trained early to imagine the unimaginable, to hope for something grand, to believe in magical promises.
The gift of wishes is that they help us see possibilities we may not see otherwise, and that is a good thing. The curse of wishes, however, is that they breed discontent. We begin to believe that all our wishes are possibilities. The compulsive gambler wishes to win the lottery and spends his small fortune on lottery tickets that are worthless. The couple in a troubled marriage wish their spouses were different. We wish we had a better job, a bigger house, better behaved children, more money, or less turmoil. When these wishes don’t come true, as inevitably they don’t, our hearts are saddened and we feel life has somehow cheated us.
Wishes rob us of contentment because we always want something we don’t have. When I was a child and would say something like, “I wish Saturday would hurry up and get here,” or “I wish it was Christmas already,” my mom would answer with one of her wise proverbs–”Don’t wish your life away.” I always thought she was talking about wishing away time. Recently, however, when I find myself wishing for something that is not and cannot be, I realize her proverb addressed the quality of life as much as the quantity of life. Wishing vanquishes the joy from my life. Rather than wishing for what cannot be, I want to learn to accept what is. Unfortunately, I’ve been conditioned to wish my life away. I wish I didn’t do that.
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