Are You in Your Gollum Stage?

Longing for What, Exactly?

The new moon in Scorpio and Mercury in retrograde must have conspired to bring us together last night—we had a big group - 15 of us if you don't count me and Seth. Seth does, I don't, lol. Among the familiar faces, we welcomed two newcomers: Max, fresh back from Guyana, and Jacob, who spent the evening in what I can only describe as deeply attentive silence. Richard, one of the founding Scoundrels visiting from Mexico snagged a seat at our table too. I couldn't help but think Jacob's quiet presence felt like kismet last night. Years ago, Richard took a vow of silence and attended Scoundrels for over a month without speaking, just deepening his presence-ing in the world.

Seth and I were a little sassy last night, but I was too busy being sassy to write it down. IYKYK.

Guys, this one was a doozy. In the best way. We were all so engaged, the ideas were flying around fast and my pencil had a hard time keeping up. What follows is what I could capture.

The Kickoff

Seth kicked us off with C.S. Lewis: "The echo of longing is the echo of a tune not yet heard." From there, he gave us a lot to chew on. What is longing, exactly? It's difficult to say. There are words in other languages that allude to it, but the concept itself is "thick". Seth kept returning to that phrase (philosophy's got bumps in the trunk, heeey!). Is longing a wish? An affliction? A precursor? A missed interaction?

Where does longing live? Is it an object in our minds? Entirely internal? If it fundamentally doesn't exist, is it always paradoxical? And what role does it play in what we are and in how we understand the world?

Seth brought up Maurice Merleau-Ponty who talked about intentional arc—the way the body moves toward something and in that moving becomes what it is. Perhaps, we have no concept of the world without longing. Is it avoidable? If it were to evaporate, what would we be like? Are there positive aspects? He invoked Simone Weil: longing and receptiveness to what one could be.

But the kickoff wasn't over there! Fondren piped up with a cascade of questions: Is longing chronological? Do we need an arrow of time to feel it? Is it based in hope? Is there any logic to it, or does it purely bubble up? Can it be satiated, or do we just get new longings?

Bob had jumped in with enthusiasm. He loved the intro and Fondren's addendum. Also, "I've got three words for you, Seth: Star Trek." He explained how the show portrayed the superiority of emotions, often using Spock as contrast. Maybe everything that makes us human is longing itself. He loves that optimistic side of Star Trek.

Words That Almost Fit

Don brought up the Portuguese word saudade—an intimate, melancholic longing that English can't quite capture. He talked about how sometimes he can't think in English because he needs a word in Portuguese or Czech that's more fitting for what he's trying to say. Seth pointed to the myriad languages that approach longing in a variety of ways. So many different languages known just in the room right now - this is what he's talking about when he says the idea is thick, so many angles, variations, and nuancing that unveil different ways we can think about the idea of longing.

The Persistent Delusion

Richard brought his deep Buddhist sensibilities to the forefront and framed longing as "a persistent delusion," a kind of suffering born of the delusion of separateness. In practice, he argued, we have to recognize that we aren't separate and that must change how we act and hopefully, eventually the way we perceive.

Seth thought this delusion sounded like a mirage, a cosmological mirage that looks like something from one angle and shifts from another. But then how would that idea apply to wanting to get rid of longing itself?

Richard talked about unskillful approaches. Failing to recognize "I have everything I need" is a way of trying to make things be what we'd have them to be, rather than how they are. He pointed to dukkha—chronic unsatisfactoriness—as the deeper aspect of longing. 

Or Maybe We Work With It?

Tonia, Ciera, and Jane started bringing in different angles. Tonia brought up the quality of pain in longing—there's a German word Ciera shared, das fernweh, that carries this melancholic ache. But Tonia said she's grown to view longing as a "precious sign of vitality." If she can recognize the longing, she can change. The pain, in her view, isn't something to eliminate—it's how we calibrate. Ciera added that having a manifestation for longing on the physical plane is a good thing.

Justin brought his mathematical thinking to bear on the question, mapping out longing versus wavering on a kind of spectrum. On one side, you have longing—a clear orientation toward something. On the other side, wavering—disruption from that longing, getting pulled away from what you were moving toward. Richard asked what he meant by wavering, so Justin gave an example: you go to a bar intending to get a drink, you're standing in line longing for that drink, then you bump into someone who gets upset and wants to argue. Suddenly you're no longer in the space of longing, you're dealing with social circumstances, furthering yourself from what you came for. Richard got it—the wavering is when you're not actively doing what you intended.

More people were bringing in ideas about what longing could be, how it might be harnessed or transformed. Then Richard asked the question that cut through: Isn't it a heavy burden to try to massage something like longing? Why go through all the trouble of massaging it so it could be harnessed or useful? Why not just let it go?

Tonia countered that for her, it's easy to massage—it's not necessarily hard for everybody. Ciera wondered why not feel the widest range of emotions? Longing, in some ways, adds value.

The room was laughing through a lot of this, the kind of playful engagement that comes when people are genuinely wrestling with ideas together.

Beauty, Time, and Being Here Now

Jane brought the conversation back around to something crucial: longing takes you out of the present. If the premise is that the present moment is what we always have—where we need to exist to stay vital—then awareness of melancholy and the skills of awareness help us pay attention to what moves us off the moment. Seth asked her to say more about her ideas - and the room giggled as she paused. We've all been there at Scoundrels before with a half baked idea - getting as much out as we thought we could and then, there's Seth coaching us to say more and dig deeper.

She reflected on friends who love going to funerals, who spend time reminiscing and sharing old stories. She worries they miss the present when they long for the past, miss how vital they are right now.

As an aside here guys, Jane did an amazing impression of Smeagol's "precious" as an illustration of an ultimate longing, which, if you know Jane, is hilarious to imagine. Especially when she followed up with "I'm in my Gollum stage."

Seth brought up rasa—a Sanskrit concept about the savoring of experience. It's about objectifying experience, considering it, rolling it around in your awareness like you'd roll a sip of wine around in your mouth. There's an aesthetic quality to how we hold and appreciate what we're experiencing, even when—maybe especially when—that experience is tinged with longing.

Bob was mulling longing and beauty — and appreciating the beauty of where we live. The best way to remember how beautiful it is here? Go away and come back. If you're longing for beauty, wake up and look at the sunrise. There was a way Bob was pointing to the importance of being present, without saying that directly. That's my take on it - not Bob's words.

That got Richard in the feels. He lives in Mexico but comes back every six months, and Oregon seduces him every single time. "I know it's unskillful," he relayed the raw beauty of riding his bike around Saddle Mountain trails, "but I long for Oregon every time I'm here."

Max talked about his year in Guyana—longing for those past feelings so much, but recognizing he's only looking at it from a certain angle. You know yourself that looking at only the positives isn't the true nature of the experience. It's like looking at a leaf instead of the whole tree. He remembered being so excited to drink water from the tap when he got back to the States, but in Guyana he misses being able to wake up and do whatever came to mind. The approach to living in time is different there. It's this weird way that longing relates to missing only a part of something past, but thinking of it as a whole.

Richard brought up Retrospective delusion. Nostalgia is we're chasing what never existed. Seth, knowing Richard practices Buddhism, wryly asked: did any of it ever exist? I like to imagine Seth in a Morpheus costume asking this.  The question brought one of those small oopsy pauses that happens when you get going on an idea and forget the framework for it. For a split second, I could feel the group processing the question and then finding the humor almost immediately.

My Own Temporal Tangent

Somewhere in all this, I found myself considering longing as a kind of temporal mistake—that it requires an ending and a beginning, a kind of separateness that doesn't necessarily exist. Seth pushed me on it (my cosmology isn't totally figured out, as I admitted).

But here's what I was thinking: the temporal mistake falls into one of two categories. Either the universe is entirely connected—everything that is, was, or ever will be already is, was, and will be, all eternally in connection with everything. In which case, longing is a mistake of time because nothing ever became disconnected. Or, on the other hand, nothing ever is to start with—we just have becoming in any given moment, in relation to everything else, but none of it actually exists or persists. In which case, longing is still a misunderstanding about time, because there's nothing to be connected to. There wasn't any connection to begin with.

Seth unpacked some Advaita Vedanta in response. Advaita Vedanta is a Hindu philosophical tradition that sees all apparent separateness as maya—illusion. In this view, what we perceive as individual selves, separate objects, even separate moments in time, are veils over the one ultimate reality, Brahman. There's no actual division, no true beginning or ending—it only seems that way from our limited perspective. Seth thought my temporal mistake ideas were running in a similar direction, that longing might be predicated on a fundamental misperception about the nature of separation and time.

What We're Left With

By the end of the night, something clarifying emerged. What Tonia, Ciera, and Jane were describing—recognizing longing as vital, being aware of the pain as calibration, experiencing the widest range of emotions—these were all skillful approaches to what Richard was talking about. They weren't disagreeing with the Buddhist insight about letting go of delusion and suffering. They were offering practical, skillful methods for doing exactly that. Richard appreciated this, even admired it. He mentioned that most people aren't showing up to philosophy talks to investigate longing—that by itself was skillful.

Richard closed us out with a sharp observation: this conversation is particularly relevant in our culture, which constantly tells us we need to be longing. There's always something we could buy that would alleviate what we're feeling. But we're also told to continue the longing.

Thom had asked earlier, a bit frustrated: "What exactly is longing?" Jane suggested maybe we should have a philosophical discussion about what "exact" means. Which is about right for a Scoundrels night. We don’t know exactly what longing is, but we do know—she thicc! We don't always arrive at answers, but we arrive at each other, laughing and thinking and longing—maybe—for exactly this.

P.S. Shout out to Bob, we heard the request for a philosophy of pain. And Ramage as Sign in Ambassor with a gold star. I owe you some tamales.