“I wish I could dance.”
“I wish I could sing.”
“I wish I could play an instrument.”
“I wish I could change my job.”
How many times have you heard this sort of thing?
How many times have you said it?
People wish for things all the time, day in day out, from January first to the top of the year. We repeat this mantra and hope that somehow, someone will listen. But what do we mean?
The very grammar of a wish statement speaks automatically of an unchangeable past. The creeping in of the subjunctive.
You cannot say, “I wish I will have the ability to swim.”
When we wish, we directly call it for what the grammar would tell us, an impossibility.
But what do we mean?
Usually, when we say “I wish,” we follow it with another clause, starting with “but.”
“But I don’t have time,”
“But I don’t know how to start,”
“But I gave it up ages ago,”
“But I’m not.”
Curse that “I’m not” for the sheep killing dog it is. You can never trust it again, it will always look to savage your dreams and menace the flock, best to take it out the back and put a bullet in its brain, whisper goodbye and move on.
“A wish with a ‘but’ is dead on the launch pad.” William Burroughs.
We trap ourselves in our words, and so when we say “I wish,” in this way, we doom ourselves to failure. We must build our desires of sterner stuff.
Once upon a time, I wished too.
I spent years wishing, wandering from wish to wish.
Those waspish ‘but’ and ‘be’s buzzed around my head, caught in a swarm of stinging insects, I wished all the harder.
I wished, and in wishing, thought that I could somehow convince the universe to listen to me, to give me what I wished for.
It never did.
How did things change?
I have moved a long way from those days, and I didn’t move all at once, but one step at a time, slipping on the rocks of a land I didn’t know, sometimes catching my breath or stopping to admire the view, look for points on the landscape to guide me.
What do people mean, what did I mean?
For years, when I said “I wish,” in fact, I meant “I wish it didn’t take the effort, I wish I didn’t have to practice.”
Notes on an almost forgotten landscape: Grey rain on tarmac, sitting in the darkness, heart palpitations, unshowered.
Then one day, determined to recover from a long period of depression, a realisation hit me. I would have to practice, indeed, a feature not a bug of the system. When we play a song, we do not play for the sake of the last note, the return to tonic, but for the progression of chords, each place and gap in the melody. When we play a song, we choose the song we want to play.
Freedom. Responsibility.
I could practice whatever I desired. I could practice as a child practices, for the joy of the practice, for the joy of learning something new, something I could love.
So I practiced, and slow step by slow step, and sometimes faster, I achieved my desires, some of them at least, while others still seem far away.
Nowadays, their distance doesn’t matter. I have found a map.
I have built habits and goals and practices, and learned and tried using many, many methods, some of which we’ll talk about in the future.
All of this brings more questions than it answers, but for now, feel your way around your landscape, practice getting from here to there and back again, enjoy your journey, and change your grammar to one better suited for the idiom of your hero’s adventure.
“I desire to learn, so I will practice.”