Taming the Genie: Small Wishes and the First Rule
Imagine that you have gone out into the desert and captured a genie. This genie is not the genie of One Thousand Nights, it does not have the capability to immediately grant a wish and make it so. Instead, it is a minor djinn, one that works its magic slowly but relentlessly. Imagine still that it wields a tricky magic that will give you exactly what you ask for, but no more and no less. It has the power to twist your wish into something worse, something that destroys other values.
It’s a genie after all. It’s not a kind creature, but it is powerful and it can give you what you want.
So what is it that you want?
If you are anything like me, you have many, many short term desires. Right now, I’m sitting by the fire and writing and wishing I had another cup of coffee. I wish my lower back wasn’t so sore, and wish that my vitamin D was more effective against the dark Northwest winter.
I love these wants because these wants are so safe. Easy to achieve with some stretching, pressing go on the Keurig and actually going outside instead of staying safe by the fire.
But what about more complex wants? Are those safe to make wishes about?
It’s the end of the year, so a common practice is for people to set New Year's resolutions. Usually, these take the form of hygienic goals, goals that equate to having a healthier lifestyle. Often they include dieting, sleeping better, more exercise, and meditating daily. It’s not obvious at first, but whispering any one of these desires to the genie is risky. To achieve these things, your life must dramatically change. Most likely, you have no idea what will have to occur. Let’s look at each of these examples just as a way of showing how disruptive a tricky genie can be.
Diet: How will you feel when you must say no to your friends about getting ice cream? How will your quality of life feel when you fight and resist temptation every day for a few months? Are you ready to feel sluggish and grumpy when you undereat because you used to eat calorie-dense food? Will your relationships survive that grumpiness? Your work productivity will go down for a bit, can you manage that? Do you understand the cognitive load of thinking about your food every day for several months as you learn how to eat and relate to your food differently? Can you manage the judgment you’ll now have for people who didn’t change their diets?
Sleep: Are you ready to parent yourself and put your phone down an hour before sleep? Will you manage the dopamine withdrawal from doing that? How do you know? Are you actually comfortable with going to bed at 10pm on a Friday, every Friday? How will your friends feel? Will you be okay with weakening some of those relationships? Will you be able to get up on time in the morning? Even with blackout curtains?
Exercise: Are you ready to be sore because you trained to hard? Are you prepared to be hungry because you didn’t eat enough of the right foods to feed your body? Are you sure you can build the habit to get out the door? Are you ready for what that habit means for the rest of your life? Can you be objective about your own body? Or are you ready to judge your own progress and feel discouraged when its like real life and not a Hollywood transformation? Are you prepared to judge your past self for not getting to it sooner?
Meditation: Do you actually give enough of a shit about your own mind to sit every day? Are you ready to have a well of emotional reserve that dials down the conflict of every encounter? Are you prepared to see your own consciousness and mind for the first time? (How could you be?) Are you prepared to become the sort of person who wants to go on retreat?
Do you see now how dangerous these small wishes are? Even these small wishes can destroy your current life and well-being.
But let me let you in on a secret.
The life you currently have is a result of a wish, too.
Today, you are wishing for exactly what you have. Your current wishes have created much of your suffering, your joys, your pleasures, and your pains. With the genie in hand, all of these things can be transformed. But all of them require you to turn to look at the fact that you do not really know what you want. You don’t know how today’s wishes will destroy and grow your life.
This is the first rule of Alchemy: you do not know what you want
In the next entry in this series, I’m going to turn to look at how we cope with the fact that we do not know what we want, and how we might see that as a tool for transformation instead of as a barrier to change.
