Our survival in this life is contingent on how we understand our basic needs. Living is the practice of meeting these needs. Our ability to meet those needs changes as we change. We complicate this extraordinarily well throughout our lives.
We have needs.
We come into this world, screaming and demanding .
Those cries from the newborn beckon us to help them survive.
Their cries beg for food, warmth and safety. And so it starts.
We seem to lose the understanding of our own needs as we grow older. We get conditioned in all sorts of ways as we live. The further we get away from the day we were born, the less we seem able to tolerate our own neediness. We judge it.
It hurts my heart when I witness someone embarrassed to admit that they have a need. We cast shame on people for needing and for expressing that need. Some even taunt others about it. “You don’t have to be such a big baby about it.”
In an effort to be “less of a baby” about it, we begin to push away the awareness that our own needs exist and forget that it’s crucial to have these needs met. We deny our needs and that usually comes out sideways in our living.
We work against our own survival at times because we don’t want to be vulnerable and we don’t want to be rejected. We do not want to have needs that we cannot meet on our own. We want self sufficiency and for others to view us as strong.
So we…
…starve ourselves.
…gamble away our security and safety.
… make choices that leave us out in the cold.
And we sprinkle all of that with a nice dose of shame and loneliness.
In our living, we often focus on the weight of need and it can be burdensome. If that’s where we are focused, we miss the true life-affirming part of need.
When we were babies, completely reliant on others, we learned something each time we had a need met: It’s not our needs alone that make us human, it’s the never being alone in our need that truly helps us live.
In our most vulnerable moments, we may desperately want to deny our needs even exist. We may want to hide the evidence of our humanity. I hope we do that less and less as we grow.
And I sincerely hope we will be big babies about it.