What I’d like to say is that for almost all of my lengthening life, I wanted things I did not have. My life was bounded by one fantasy after another.

I wanted to live in Cambridge near Harvard. I wanted to write a great novel, acclaimed by all of the critics; I wanted to live on Cape Cod, near Truro Mass., where all the great New York writers summered and wrote in windswept rooms in front of the Ocean.

I wanted to live in San Franciso, where the digital revolution was born. I wanted to live in New York City, in Greenwich Village, and play chess in Washington Square Park. I wanted to win a Pulitzer Prize and then a National Book Award.

I traveled all over the country, chasing the ghosts of my imagination.

I wanted to be an esteemed literary figure, maybe summering in the summer in the Provincetown cabin on the dunes where Eugene O’Neill wrote his plays.

I dreamt again and again of making it in New York City – I worked in magazines, for the New York Times, I lived in the Village and ate Sicilian pizza every night and chased after wonderful young women who left their empty lives to get to the Promised Land.

I wanted to live in Boston, on the Charles River, and go back to school, and hang out with literary people.  I wanted to move among the classiest and most gifted writers and write best sellers until I could barely stand up.

I wanted to live on a sheep farm in Pennsylvania and train border collies to herd sheep.

I never wanted to live where I lived for 25 years, in a suburb of New York, in New Jersey.

From my earliest days, I wanted things I did not have and could not get.

I yearned for everything and always aimed too high and never was satisfied with who I was or where I lived.  In so doing, I ran away from the very gifts I did have.

I drove my first wife nearly mad with my yearning, my moving, my restlessness.

I moved more than a dozen times when I started working. I always wanted to be someplace I wasn’t, and I was smart enough and talented enough to get people to hire me, but I was never happy until I ran to the mountain and got my cabin.

I never moved again after that, except to my first farm, then my second. I learned the great lesson of moving: the problem is, I always came too. When I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t see that the person I was, was enough.

Last night, I talked to my therapist, the woman who helped me climb out of the dark hole I fell into just before I started my blog in 2007. We were talking about the things I wanted them, as my life had fallen apart.

“Tell me what it is you want now, Jon?

I recognized this; I’d been asked it before.

That is one of the great, almost universal therapy questions – therapy, after all, is all about figuring out why you don’t have what you want and how you might be able to get it.

Her question shocked me and silenced me.

My therapist has helped me clean up a bit, getting to things we never got to a decade ago, some occasional bursts of anxiety, and dread of taking care of myself. It was at that moment that I realized the importance of her question.

I thought a bit, a long silence for me.

“I have to tell you,” I said. “I don’t want anything that I don’t have. I guess a better way to say that is that I have everything I want. I have Maria; I have my blog,  my writing is better than ever, I have my photography, I have my dogs, I have a few wonderful friends, I have my farm, the donkeys, the sheep, a wonderful old farmhouse. I have very loyal and wonderful people who have put up with me from the beginning, children of my blog, my new family.  I have the Mansion and Bishop Maginn High School and all of the wonderful people in those places. I’m facing up to taking care of myself and loving that. I have my heart back. I’m doing some work on the rest of me. I don’t want anything that I don’t have.”

Just hearing me say it shocked me and then thrilled me. I didn’t get it, really.

Then I realized that this is the first time in my life that this has been true. My mind was so scrambled, I didn’t realize that my journey was over, I was where I wanted to be.

I don’t want or need anything that I don’t have. Or better put, I have everything I want.

The odd thing is that never once, amidst all that yearning, did I ever yearn for what I have now. I never imagined Maria or the power of true love.

I never imagined living with donkeys, sheep, or living on a farm – I had never set foot on a farm. I never imagined being in a small rural village nobody in New York City or San Francisco ever heard of, herding my ship up into the hills with my wonderful dogs.

I am a stranger here too, a refugee always, but I am home. Nobody can take that away.

What does this mean? That we don’t know what we want? That we might already have what we want? That we might stumble into what we want, without even realizing it?

Perhaps the answer is simple.

I found love when I was open to it. I found life when I was open to it. No one told me, and I never imagined that what I yearned for was not really what I wanted or could even have. I kept rushing up the ladder and came close to the sun a dozen times. My wings kept melting.

What I wanted wasn’t to be.

I always fell off that ladder, and it always hurt. And then, by happenstance and the suggestion of a good friend, I came home to what I really yearned for and found everything I wanted.

As is symbolic of my life, my friend, who I loved dearly, moved away one day without telling me, and he has never spoken to me since. I can’t say that that means either; other than that, it still hurts.

I ran from a 35-year-old marriage, and that still hurts too, as it should. Much of my panic and confusion is gone now; I have settled into me.

All that running, and all that yearning, and here I am, right where I belong.

“Isn’t that a remarkable thing?” I said to the therapist, who I trusted with my life. I could always talk to her more easily than anyone before.

“I don’t think it was an accident,” she said. “You knew what you really wanted, and you came looking for it. You re-imagined and reconstructed your life, and that was brave and very real. You went out and earned it. And you deserve it.”

I think the true meaning is this: I always looked outside, never inside, to find what I wanted, to figure out the meaning of life. I always thought the answer was out there when, really, it was right in there.

I never looked inside, where the truth and answer were always hiding, my soul waiting, dormant, smothered in confusion and emptiness. But ready.

What I want to say is that this was a miracle, an impossible thing. Old men don’t change that much; it’s not in their genes or history; no one has that expectation of them. Very few have it of themselves.

Old men are supposed to settle down in their favorite chairs and stare out the window at the incomprehensible world beyond their fading dreams. No wonder my heart was broken.

I never knew the answer was inside of me all the time, waiting for an angel to come and kiss me on the lips and wake me up from my great slumber. Or it might have been a border collie named Rose.

Or perhaps an artist, yearning like me for her soul to be freed.

It almost came too late; it really did; I woke up at the last minute, as the plane was about to crash into the mountain. I managed to jump out of the plan and survive.

I ran to the mountain instead and will never move again or yearn for anything outside of my life.

“The Heart is right to cry.

Even when the smallest drop of light,

Of Love, 

Is Taken Away.

Perhaps you may kick, moan, scream in dignified silence.

But you are so right.

To do so in any fashion,

Until God returns to you.”

— Hafiz