What the Wanting Asks For

Somewhere in the forties the wanting changes shape. It does not shrink, which is what I had been quietly promised by everyone older than me. It splits. Some of what I want now genuinely enlarges me, and some of it only makes the evening pass more comfortably, and from the inside, in the moment of wanting, the two feel identical. That is the actual problem. Not that I want things in my forties. That I cannot tell, while wanting, which kind of want I am having.

This summer handed me a clean experiment without intending to. Two desires, running in parallel, across the same six weeks. Neither was a need by any definition worth defending. One of them is still going. The other was back in its box within four days.

The exam I kept not sitting

In June I decided to get a motorbike licence. There is no sensible version of this. I live in Manchester, where it rains with real commitment. I have two sons, one six and one two. I own a car that starts every morning. As transport logistics it is worse than what I already have in every measurable respect, and more dangerous, and it will take months.

None of that is why I want it. I want it because a motorbike is not transport. It is the last legal way I know to be somewhere entirely on my own, with nothing between me and the weather, unreachable for an hour, moving. Everything else in my life has become a negotiation with other people's calendars. That is not a complaint, it is what a working life with small children is, and I chose all of it. But a man needs one thing that belongs to nobody else's schedule.

So I booked the theory test, and then I did not study.

For three weeks that goal sat at one step out of six. I abandoned it and recreated it and abandoned it again, which is what rearranging a task looks like when you have run out of ways to avoid noticing you are not doing it. Six weeks of intention producing one sixth of a syllabus.

I know now why I stalled. A test can be failed. Riding can be done badly, in public, in your forties. There is a version of that summer where I sit the exam and discover I am not quite the man I had been picturing on the bike. Desire that actually enlarges you arrives with the possibility of humiliation stapled to it, and that is precisely why it takes three weeks to open the book.

The research nobody asked me to do

Across those same evenings I did not stall on the camera even once.

I compared three of them properly. Weight in grams, depth in millimetres, which ones genuinely close a jeans pocket and which ones only say so in the marketing. I watched review after review after review, some of them twice. One evening in the middle of July my day records one sixth of a motorcycle syllabus and five camera videos, which is an honest picture of a man's priorities whether or not he would have described them that way at the time.

I already owned a better camera. I knew that throughout. The research was never going to conclude anything, because it was not there to conclude. It was there to be pleasant.

Here is the detail that stayed with me. Through the same weeks I was listening to the third chapter of the Bhagavad Gita in Hindi in the evenings, the chapter where Krishna calls desire the eternal enemy of the wise. I was being handed the answer in one window while running the problem in another and noticing nothing at all.

The camera came on a Monday. By Friday it had gone back. Not out of discipline. Out of the very specific embarrassment of holding a thing and feeling absolutely nothing move.

Telling one from the other

So here is the only test I have found that works, and it is not whether you need it. That question is useless. Almost nothing that makes a life worth living is needed.

A desire that enlarges you asks you for effort. A desire that is filling something asks you only for money. The bike wanted months, a test I could fail, and a version of me that does not exist yet. The camera wanted a card number and an afternoon. One of those was going to change who I am. The other was going to change what is on my desk.

The wanting that costs you only money is not a small want. It is a large one, pointed at the wrong thing.

And I want to be careful here, because the easy ending is to call the second kind a weakness and I do not believe that. The camera want was not a moral failure. It was a reading on a dial. Something in that stretch of summer was under-fed, some part of me that wanted to make things rather than manage them, and it announced itself the way these things do, as an object with excellent specifications. The feeling underneath it was completely real. Wanting to feel alive is not a defect to be corrected. It is the most reliable signal any of us gets that something has gone quiet.

The mistake is answering the signal with a purchase. Buying the thing silences the dial without touching what the dial was measuring, and then you get a fortnight of relief and the needle climbs again, one storey higher, better dressed.

So do not kill the second kind of want. Read it. When you catch yourself researching something at eleven at night, ask what feeling you are hoping arrives in the box. You already know. You have known since before the first tab opened. Then go and find the version of that feeling that asks you for effort instead, because there is almost always one, and it is almost always the thing you have been postponing.

I sat the theory test and passed it. Three weeks of avoidance, then a fortnight of actually opening the book, and in the end it was an ordinary morning in an ordinary test centre and it was over before eleven. The relief had almost nothing to do with the mark. It was in finding out that the man I had been picturing on the bike was not a fantasy, only untested, which are two very different things and I had spent a month treating them as one.

And it is not finished. A theory pass is the first gate of several. There is the training, the road test, the months of being visibly a beginner at something in your forties. The want is still asking me for things, which is precisely how I know which kind of want it was. The camera stopped asking the moment it arrived, and four days later it was gone.

Today is Guru Purnima, the day for the ones who taught you something. It seems only fair to count both of them. One taught by arriving. The other is still teaching, one gate at a time.