We start life wanting.
Not out of greed, but wonder.
A child’s want is pure — unedited, curious, alive.
It isn’t reaching to possess; it’s reaching to participate.
That’s how the spirit learns its edges: by touching what calls to it.
Then we inherit a different language.
We’re taught to speak in needs.
We need to have.
We need to earn.
We need to behave.
We need to succeed.
The word sounds responsible — but somewhere in the translation, something soft is lost.
What began as wonder becomes weight.
What was once curiosity becomes caution.
Our parents didn’t invent or intend this.
They were doing what every generation before them was taught to do —
to protect what they love by preparing for what might go wrong.
They carried the memory of hunger, war, displacement, and loss —
echoes that take many forms across our lineages.
For some of us, it was Partition or caste.
For others, migration, enslavement, exile, or the quiet fractures of colonial rule.
Every family holds its own story of leaving and of surviving.
Even if they never lived those moments themselves,
their bodies remembered.
Their love became caution.
Their devotion became discipline.
They handed us the habits that kept them alive —
and we received them as the rules for how to live.
What did your ancestors hand down as protection?
And what might you now hand forward as presence?
Because this inheritance is not only emotional — it is economic, spiritual, and systemic.
We live in a world shaped by the hoarding of both prosperity and pain.
Prosperity hoards security; pain hoards survival.
Both distort our sense of what we truly want and need.
Those who inherit prosperity are taught to want endlessly and need nothing —
to fill the void with choice.
Those who inherit pain are taught to need endlessly and want nothing —
to survive by restraint.
And between them, humanity forgets how to receive.
To awaken is not to trade places between privilege and poverty,
but to release the hoarding itself.
To let want become curiosity again,
and need become connection again.
Because the union we long for isn’t found in balance —
it’s found in reciprocity.
Where those who have learn to open,
and those who hurt learn to rest.
But what began as care slowly calcified into conditioning.
We learned to need before we learned to want.
We learned that safety was more important than aliveness.
And though it kept us from falling, it also kept us from flying.
Now we’re learning to see the pattern —
to notice the reflex before we repeat it.
To ask whether what we’re handing down is protection or projection.
Whether the lessons that kept us safe are the same ones that now keep us small.
Because maybe awakening isn’t about rejecting what we’ve inherited,
but about remembering what preceded it.
Before the need to prove, there was the want to play.
Before the need to survive, there was the want to live.
Before the need to be right, there was the want to belong.
That’s the scenery I see now —
a horizon where want and need no longer argue.
Where want becomes the movement of spirit,
and need becomes the rhythm of belonging.
Together they form the pulse of union —
the place where what we reach for
meets what we already are.
The Lens of Presence
Maybe this is what the lenses were always revealing.
That we begin in wonder, when wanting is innocent.
We grow through weight, when need learns its gravity.
And we remember through wisdom, when both dissolve into presence.
Every want is an echo of spirit reaching outward,
every need a pulse of belonging reaching back.
To see through the lens of presence is to hold both —
not to fix what’s missing,
but to stay with what’s alive.