For a long time, I struggled with the Buddhist concept that desire leads to suffering. It felt severe to me, harsh, even a little bit inhuman. Sure, I've suffered over desire—haven't we all?—but I didn't want to stop feeling desirous. The people I know who tried to live that austere, meditative life didn't strike me as wise or particularly liberated: if anything, they seemed disconnected with themselves, afraid of some of the most basic parts of who they were.

But I'd misunderstood (and so did they, I think). It's not desire that leads to suffering. Desire leads to attachment, and attachment leads to suffering. Attachment: when you stop living through your own eyes, and start living in your head. When what you have is not enough, because of what you want. When here-and-now starts to feel miserable, because you imagine somewhere else, you imagine a future that might not come to be, and here-and-now seems mean and impoverished by comparison.

Trite as this feels to say, desire is a joy when you enjoy it. When the fact of wanting is a pleasure in and of itself, you are at peace with your desires. You owe nothing to them, lose nothing. You are free to live alongside your wanting, influenced by it only by the fact that you're happy right where you are.

I'm not a fan of the phrase "live in the moment." It, too, seems to be spoken a lot by people who are short-sighted and lost, and it gets used as a justification for some extremely asinine ways of living. But there's a similar sentiment that I like a lot, which I feel cuts back on a lot of the horseshit. It's the notion that utopia is right here and right now. It is not some faraway dream for you to cling to. It's not the potential for the world to turn into something else. The only potential you've got is what you have right where you are, right in this moment. And it's only when you appreciate it—both what you have and what you don't have, both the eases and the hardships—that you can work with it as it is, instead of letting it pass by for the sake of something that may be coming down the line.

Paradise is what could be. It's not what could be later, though. It's what could be right now. Somehow, the thought of that is more overwhelming than the thought of dreaming of the future—turns out there's a lot more opportunity in the present than any of us feel comfortable with. But it's noticing that, and appreciating it, and finding ways of doing something with it and celebrating it, that make the days sweeter, and life longer, and the harder parts a little easier to work with.

The people I've been happiest with are the ones who enjoyed what we had together in the moments that we had it. The ones I've been the most miserable with didn't give a fuck about right now: none of it mattered, except for the thought of what it might lead to later. Similarly, sometimes I want people so wretchedly that it makes me miserable, because all I can think about is what I might have with them one day—and the possibility of not having it, and the question of why it wouldn't happen (which leads inevitably to self-loathing). These days, I'm much better at wanting people just for what they are to me, and what I have with them. Sometimes that leads to much richer and more decadent things; sometimes it goes nowhere. Either way, I'm happy. It's a pleasure just to be with them, just to want them as they are right now—and if they go, it's a pleasure to wave farewell, knowing how lovely it's been to have even a little of them in my life.

Sometimes, a certain kind of person gets suspicious when I enjoy being with them. They accuse me of having an ulterior motive. It's not that I seem to be hiding something from them that sets off their alarm bells—perversely, it's the fact that I don't seem to be concealing anything at all. Where am I trying to get with them? What do I want from them? Where is all this leading? It's harder for them to accept that I sincerely mean it when I say that I'm happy with this, right here and right now, and am not thinking too hard about a minute from now. What's there to think about? One way or another, we will get there.

What took me a while to understand—and what I worry most about not understanding—is that, for some people, the pleasure of the present moment is only the hope it gives them for the future. Whatever delights they're feeling now pale before the possibilities they're imagining; their joy comes from picturing what's next. The slightest deviation from that possibility, the littlest potential threat, plants a pit of dread in their stomach. They're craving a stability they can't find, because the stability they want is an unbroken path spanning years into the future: a guarantee that they will comfortably sail towards some destination that's too far away to physically see. The gentlest turbulence becomes deeply unsettling, because any shift in their "calculated" course threatens to lead them thousands of miles away from where they wanted to wind up.

Of course, it isn't calculation. There's no strategy to it, no tactics. Only a blind faith in a fairy tale, and a prayer that someone else could make that fairy tale come true. They need someone else to do it, and they spend their lives waiting for the right person to come along and make it happen, because none of it is about what they would like to do. It is purely about what they'd like to have happen all around them. They're a passive consumer of their own life, and the most they can think to do is leave a sour Yelp review when the thing that happens isn't just the thing they want.

This all sounds harsh, but I don't mean it harshly. I sympathize with people who work like this, because of course I've been this person too. When you feel powerless, every little hurt rips into you like your heart is an overripe fruit—and of course you feel like you're doomed by fate, unable to change a thing. I felt powerless. But I felt powerless because I failed to comprehend what power was.I'd been hurt by people who left me feeling small, so I imagined that power meant feeling big. I'd been made to feel weak, so I imagined strength. I'd been unable to stop the things that happened to me, so what I imagined was control: forcing the world around me into place, and keeping it there. And when I wasn't perfectly strong, utterly vast, entirely in control—and of course I never was, because I'm human—all I could do was fantasize about something else coming along, a great power that could right all my wrongs, undo all my certainties, and left me live the life that I'd imagined.

None of that is power. Or I should say: none of that is deep power. Power, I came to realize, is presence: it's living in your own shoes, in your own head, in your own life, in your own body, in your own world. Power is embracing where you are, and who you are, rather than shunning and denying it. It is recognizing that you are strong and you are weak; you are big and you are small; you are in control, and you are adrift in a vast storm. I don't exactly believe in souls, but I'd still describe power as ownership over your own soul: taking possession of yourself, letting yourself be who and what you are, and rejoicing in it—regardless of what other people feel and think and do.

When we suffer, we dissociate. We try and leave ourselves behind... and sometimes we never come back. When the moment is painful, we leave the moment. When the world feels like a burden, we leave the world behind. But anyone who's ever healed from this kind of hurt, anyone who's found their way back to themselves, knows that the healing itself can make you cry. The healing is a gentle kind of pain: it's letting yourself feel what you denied yourself back then, letting yourself take ownership of it bit by bit, feeling the tenderness that you tried to cut off, the life that you tried to suffocate, letting it hurt because you are hurting, as much as you were hurting, because the hurt will never end unless you let it hurt. The hurt is hidden down a series of abandoned passageways that we never let ourselves go down, the once-vastness within us slowly growing cold and narrow and dark, until we're stuck in a single cramped room, trying not to feel claustrophobic, because every other place in our house has been taken over by the demons that we fear. All that we have left is the most wretched kind of hope: the kind that we must externalize, some outside force that we invent to believe in, because we've given up all hope that we will ever believe in ourselves.

This vision of paradise is a violent one, though we never admit its violence. Power, by contrast, is a gentleness, even amidst all the turbulence, even amidst the suffering. It's the difference between denying something and letting it go: to say farewell, you must embrace it. And the power lies in the courage of that embrace. The power is letting yourself hold what you're afraid of holding, feel what you're afraid of feeling, trusting that, whatever it is (and whatever it isn't),it will not destroy you. It can't destroy you. Only you can do that to yourself. Self-destruction is the one of the only two real powers that we have—the other being, of course, daring to let yourself remain alive.

The exuberance of desire can mean two things. I love one, and am deathly wary of the other. The one I'm wary of is the fierce, frenzied "happiness" of somebody who believes that they may have found a way to escape—a way to stop being themselves. To them, it feels like freedom, but it is doomed to collapse into a new sense of self-annihilation. Because their exuberance, even in the moment, is a kind of self-destruction: it is a confession that what they desire is not somebody or something, but the possibility that the object of their desire will destroy them, and build them into something new.

The other kind of exuberance is gentler: it doesn't thrash. It's more the smile of a creature in the sun: an all-encompassing embrace, lingering on every moment. It needs nothing; it doesn't need to go anywhere. All it wants is what it has right here.

Both kinds of desire lead to motion; with a little experience, you can set the two apart. The one kind of motion is like a sales pitch. It's cunning; it's a maneuver. It wants to make the next thing happen. It tries to seem cool and unstudied, utterly unflappable, but this masks a profound agitation. Attempt a moment's patience with it, test it for even the length of a long breath, and it will suddenly lunge out and try to rip you to pieces. The other motion, by contrast, is patient and unhurried. It stretches out like a plant unfurling towards the light. It is an extension of this moment, a continuation, building upon what's already there, loving and respecting everything that's presently in place, as its roots crawl deeper and its buds start to blossom out. Everything stays in place, even amidst all of the movement.

These are the two interpretations of desire: the two potential visions of what comes next. One is the attachment that leads to suffering. The other is unattached, because it isn't quite desire—it is attainment. Attainment, not of what you hope comes next, but of what you've found already. It is peace, both with what moves and with what doesn't. It is the opposite of severe or repressed; lack of attachment is not the same thing as abandonment. If anything, it is what all healthy commitment is founded on: a commitment, not to uprooting, but to letting things remain as they are, while accepting that they will also change. Its vision of the future is a vision of the present moment; its paradise is already here. All is well, all is well, all is well. Even the parts that aren't okay, paradoxically, are okay. What hurts is what heals, and vice versa. All is well, all is well, all is well.

It is a privilege, and a fortune, to feel desirous. The bounty lies, not in the payoff, but in what you feel right here and now. Let it linger. Don't try to change it. This wanting is part of the beauty; when you can look someone in the eyes and thank them for what they've given you, and mean it, before they feel they've given you anything at all, then you have what it takes to be happy with them. Not just to find happiness in them, but to bring happiness back to them too. And if they look at you suspiciously, if they ask you what your game is, if they ask what on earth you want to happen next... you can say with a straight face, "I'm not sure. What would you like to have happen?" The deepest joy is to help somebody find what they already have—to share, and to rejoice with them, and to bask, in everything that is already here.