You Can't Always Get What You Want

I have loved The Rolling Stones for years, and this song in particular has held a special resonance because I loved the idea that, if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need, but I never really believed it.   I totally believed in the first part--that things we want get denied us--but it was the second part that tripped me up.  How could something you need grow from NOT getting what you want?  Especially when the whole not getting part is usually bloody and brutal.

Over the last couple of years I have gotten very little of what I wanted.  A divorce, a heartbreak, debt, loneliness, fear, anxiety...you name it.  What I wanted--my marriage to succeed, my love to evolve, and so on--were all things that required me to control something.  I thought if I could control my ending marriage, if I could control where my love was headed, I could somehow reach that elusive okayness that I'd been missing for so long.

I didn't get a thing I wanted, but I'll be damned if I didn't get what I need.  I didn't need to be my ex-husband's wife, I need to be his friend.  We support and love one another in a way that doesn't fit in a marriage but totally fits in a friendship.  I didn't need an exclusive commitment to be able to love someone as deeply and as totally as I find I still do love another.  I need that man and I to be who we have always been: two souls passionately connected in a way that defies description and has no boundaries.  But mainly, I didn't need relationship to define my value or my worth, but that was--all along--what I wanted.  I wanted someone else to love me to prove I was okay--that I was enough--but what I needed was to love myself enough to know that I was already okay.

The process was brutal and--metaphorically--bloody, and I don't for one minute think it's over, but I am in no hurry to plan or control anymore.  I'm content to live each moment as it comes, moving towards goals I hope to accomplish but recognizing that even if I never get exactly what I may think I want, God and the universe and the big beautiful hopeful world at large will see to it that I get what I need.

Hallelujah.