The Depth of Yearning

It’s our last couple days of NaPoWriMo (National /Global Poetry Writing Month) and the A-Z Challenge. I hope you’re enjoying the A to Z of Depth.

I really like the word yearning. It evokes longing and desire, but also has year in it and earning and is only one letter off from learning. I found a quote that expresses just that:

“A happy life is one spent in learning, earning, and yearning.”~ Lillian Gish

I’ve written about yearning during A to Z twice before: In 2022 as part of my abstract nouns study, Day Twenty-Nine: The Birth of Yearning, and in 2023 as part of contradictory abstract nouns starting with the same letter, Poetry Month Challenges Day 29: Yearning and Yield. I also wrote about yearning in an interesting post in November of 2022, in my contradictory abstract nouns study Misguided Yearning for Contentment Without Agitation.

So why another post about yearning? Because when I looked up the difference between yearning and desire I read, “While “yearn” and “desire” both describe a longing for something, “yearn” typically implies a deeper, often more intense . . . longing. Yearning is a more powerful and profound longing. So yearning is in our definition of depth: “the quality of being profound.” Let’s look more deeply at yearning.

The word yearn originated from the Old High German gerōn, meaning desire, the Latin hortari to urge, encourage, and the Greek chairein to rejoice. And yet it has a negative connotation in its meaning: to long persistently, wistfully or sadly. Yearning is complicated that way: it’s positive in that it’s a deep-seated longing that motivates us, and yet it’s a longing for something unattainable that can discourage and frustrate us.

My attempts at a deeper exploration of yearning led me to Dr. Stephen Hayes, Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), and The Hexaflex Model of psychological flexibility.

ACT is a type of cognitive-behavioral therapy, that provides a set of skills for staying in the present moment while acting on long-term values. ACT uses mindfulness to help you stay in the moment because it is based on the idea that we cannot control our thoughts or emotions, but we can control our behavioral responses, and we can only do that in the present moment.

According to Jacob Martinez of the ACT Matrix, Stephen Hayes assigns six core yearnings to the six points of the Hexaflex model:

• Yearning for Belonging
• Yearning for Coherence
• Yearning for Orientation
• Yearning for Feeling
• Yearning for Self Directed Meaning
• Yearning for Competence

Since I’m just discovering ACT and the core yearnings, I’ll write another post after I’ve read Stephen Hayes’s books.

What Do I Yearn For? an exercise

I think discovering and identifying our deepest yearnings is a good place to start if we want to write and think more deeply, but how do we do that? I thought back to the fears exercise from the Deep-seated Belief post at the beginning of the month. Could we just switch the opening list from things we’re afraid of to things we yearn for? We can try it.

Then I thought of exercises in The Artist’s Way. It seems like Julia Cameron is always trying to get me to write what I yearn for in different ways. Let’s try it.

Here are some list prompts. I made these up inspired by exercises in The Artist’s Way. For each prompt list ten things as quickly as you can.

1. What did you love to do as a kid that you don’t do anymore?
2. If you had plenty of money what would you do that you don’t do now?
3. Imagine you could visit yourself through the multi-verse. What other fun lives would you be living?
4. What would you be doing if your dreams started coming true?
5. If you had had the perfect childhood, what would you have grown up to be?
6. List the skills or talents you wish you had.

Now take a look at your lists. Can you label the things you’ve listed with the six core yearnings? Is one yearning, or a pattern of yearning becoming clear? In the present moment is there one thing you can do to change that yearning into action? Do it.

Today’s Poem

Toccata

Some days you
just want
to pound the keys
violent, loud

hammering sound
the whole day
banging through
each finger

muscles tensed
to mallets
meeting resistance
past exhaustion

He says you need
to know
your folk songs

near the end
vibrating bodiless
in energy’s hum
blinded by
inhuman luminescence
the songs all join
your oscillation

This poem was inspired by today’s prompts at NaPoWriMo and Writer’s Digest’s April Poem a Day (PAD) Challenge.

Thank you so much for coming by and reading my post. Any thoughts or questions about yearning? Come back tomorrow for more depth exploration and poetry.