The Smiling Buddha and the Borrowed Desire

With a cigar in my mouth, the Aegean Sea in front of me, I look away from my laptop towards where the endless sea meets the sky. I can feel the breeze across my neck, my back, my shoulders.

I don’t have to meditate. Mindfulness comes naturally.

I’m in Paros, Greece, on a two-week vacation to be with family and take some time out from work. But I also need to write this essay right now.

The flow from writing, that breeze. How can I explain how I’m feeling? Just assume it’s somewhere near bliss and inner peace — that smiling Buddha I always aspire to be.

Is this what I really want? Or is it something that I want to want? Is it a feeling I crave because it’s Hemingway talking to me?

“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” — René Girard

I grew up wanting to make money. My father and everyone within his orbit were in on the game. We hardly knew doctors, lawyers, writers, or engineers. Everyone around us was business-minded, trying to make money.

I never asked where that wanting came from. It was simply what we did.

I can’t deny it worked, since my entrepreneurship and the company I built are paying for this wonderful vacation that I’m on.

But then, when I was forty-five, on a whim, I started to write. I enjoyed the self-expression, the solitude, and the way writing helped me grow in self-awareness. The deeper I got into the writing world, the more I desired that life. Who wouldn’t want to be Hemingway?

I’ve always been convinced that I was following my deepest desires in each case. I thought that my longings were independent and autonomous.

Along came the French anthropologist René Girard, who made me question all my assumptions.

“We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths,” he said, “but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.”

What if our desires are not ours — not under our control, not something we manufactured? Instead, desire is a social process. It is mimetic. In other words, we want what other people want.

This assumption that our desires are all our own, and the stories we tell ourselves about them, is what Girard calls “The Romantic Lie.”

Was it my desire to make money, or was it what I saw everyone around me want so badly that made me want it too? What if I fell in love with writing because of Hemingway’s character and passion for life?

But when I write, something in me becomes whole; life is much clearer and more alive. I had never felt elation like the morning I learned I was going to be published in Elephant Journal.

Unlike basic needs (food, shelter and sex), our wants are not instinctual but instead fall under mimetic desire. We follow people who show us what is worth wanting.

The people we imitate are those we believe are higher up the ladder that we are climbing. We hold them (models) in such high esteem that we never stop thinking about whether the ladder we ascend is leaning on the wrong wall.

What makes it worse is that we are not always aware that our mimetic desires operate beneath our conscious thoughts and rule our thinking and goal-setting.

We are concerned with what Girard calls the metaphysical desire: the desire for another’s desire, not the object itself.

In 2016, I went on a one-month writing course in Paris. There I read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast in a café on the Place St-Michel, where he spent his mornings writing feverishly.

Maybe I don’t want the café. I don’t even want Paris. What I want is to be the man who just wrote for hours on end and believed that his morning’s work mattered.

Girard says every desire is imitated. But I don’t completely agree, as I think some of them, examined long enough, turn out to be passions that we want for ourselves, like what I described earlier — the wholeness, the clarity, the sense of being more alive.

Writing inexplicably arrived to me. No one forced me to write. To date, I haven’t earned much from it. That, to me, feels more intrinsically motivated than an imitated want.

When we notice our desires, examine them, and know whose ladder we are on, we move towards who we truly must be.

Which leaves me with a harder question than the one I began with. I never examined the money desire. I absorbed it for three decades without asking. True, it has paid for a lot of good things in my life, but did I ever want it in the first place?

I climbed my father’s ladder. I am now climbing Hemingway’s. But this was a conscious choice, one that came to me naturally and wholeheartedly.

A borrowed desire isn’t disqualified from being ours. What disqualifies it is never examining it long enough to know whether it makes our hearts smile.

Perhaps my writing desire was borrowed. But I have looked at it, and turned it over, and I am keeping it and all the blissful moments that have come from it.

Right now, I do feel like the smiling Buddha.