What’s it feel like to want?

That question seems to visit me a good bit lately. It used to just sit in that list of things my grandad would say. Not particularly high up, either. Just one of those filler lines that bulked up the collection, not one I found much use for in the run of a normal day.

When I was a boy, I took it as teasing. A reminder that I’d best get used to wanting, because I likely wasn’t going to get it. I wanted a lot of things I couldn’t have, and dammit, I was well aware of it. There was no need to go pouring salt into a raw spot.

With a few more years on me, the question became more about discipline. A quiet acceptance of a man’s limitations. Knowing your means and figuring out how to live inside them. But when I became a father, it took on a heavier tone. I came to see it as something a man might say out of shame, because he knew he couldn’t provide.

In this latter stretch of my life, though, that question casts a much longer shadow. I used to hear it as a comment about whatever I wanted at the time. Now I hear the wanting itself. How much of my life it has occupied. How readily one object has replaced another.

I had wanted to be a doctor for as long as I could remember wanting anything. Why is harder to say. I have stories I tell, but their truth got tangled up in an interview process that expected an elegant answer. After enough practice, it becomes difficult to remember which parts you knew about yourself and which parts you learned to say. I suspect it was simpler than most of my answers. Doctors seemed to have enough money to take care of themselves and their families. That looked like a good thing to become.

Medical school was a slog. I went from being the smartest guy in the little rooms I had lived in to being another student in a lecture hall full of them. It was the first place my Appalachia embarrassed me. I began changing how I spoke and dressed, paying attention to things I had never thought required correction. There was a great deal to learn, and some of it had nothing to do with medicine.

Through all of that, the M.D. remained ahead of me. Those two letters gave the effort somewhere to go. When I wanted to stop, I could still imagine reaching them.

Then I did.

I had become the thing I had wanted to be since childhood, and there was more training ahead. More examinations. Eventually, another certification to establish that I knew what I was doing. Each requirement had a reason. I still had things to learn, and people whose care would depend on my learning them.

But the boy who wanted to be a doctor had not understood how much of becoming one would consist of preparing for the next thing. I had reached what I once thought of as the destination. By then, I was already looking beyond it.

The degree could certify what I had completed. It could not give me the feeling of having arrived.

The habit of looking toward the next requirement became familiar enough that I carried it into places where no one else was setting one.

The military gave that effort another structure, with schools, assignments, and ranks that made progress easy to recognize. Family brought obligations that could not wait for me to feel rested or satisfied. There was money to earn and a future to provide for. Those were real purposes. I would choose much of that work again.

But fitness could always be measured against a better number. Writing could become another thing I had not done enough of. Even love could become tangled in the effort to make a life finally feel complete. I became practiced at directing my attention toward whatever remained unfinished. What I had already done required less attention. It was there. I could turn away from it.

Achievements did satisfy me. They just did not settle the question for long. What was desperately wanted became ordinary, and I began considering what came next. The instinct to keep reaching got years of practice. Satisfaction got whatever time was left before I gave myself another assignment.

The strange thing about getting older is that eventually, you begin arriving in places your younger self once treated as destinations. There is enough food. Enough money. Work worth doing. A body that still carries you where you ask it to go. These things once represented a future I was trying to secure. Now they are ordinary facts of my life.

There are mornings when nothing is broken badly enough to require repair. Whatever still needs doing can wait a little while. I could sit where I am without making the day worse.

Those moments make me uneasy.

My mind begins looking for what I have overlooked. Something to finish. Something I could do better. Some part of me still believes a man standing still must have forgotten something.

I have spent so long preparing for what comes next that satisfaction can feel irresponsible. There is a quiet suspicion that it is just laziness wearing clean clothes. I can accept that I have earned a rest more easily than I can accept that nothing needs earning for a little while. Rest still belongs to the work. It prepares me to resume.

Could I leave a little capacity unused? Finish a day without requiring every available hour to justify itself? Let something be good without immediately considering how to make it better?

I do not trust the idea of enough forever. Circumstances change. People need things. There is work I still want to do, and I would miss the wanting if it disappeared altogether. But there may be enough for now, even with things unfinished.

I can want something else without treating what I already have as a disappointment.

I can still want another book, another mile, another hand reaching for mine in the dark. I can still miss what is gone. None of that requires me to call this moment insufficient.

For now, the coffee is hot. My hands still work. The people I love are somewhere in the world. The day has asked nothing impossible of me yet.

I am trying not to add a debt where none exists.