About holiday wishes

New Year is the most wishful holiday. Everyone wants everything for everyone – “and what you yourself want for yourself.” The last option seems to be used by those who are afraid of mistakes. And, of course, mistakes can happen. The author of wishes takes on a certain courage in relation to the “toasted”, estimating his condition by eye and determining what is missing. If we don’t guess, we’ll offend, but if we guess too accurately, we run the risk of getting into a sore spot. After all, a wish is a kind of diagnosis: for example, it is extremely rare for young people, and only in special circumstances, to wish health. Toasts begin to sound just when it is in question. Do millionaires want wealth? To be honest, I don’t know. But I suspect that they rather want to keep it. There is a subtle but significant difference here. It is not surprising that most often we hear clichéd wishes for love-happiness and success-prosperity. And, as a rule, we accept them smiling, but without thinking. And this is true: it is not the content that is important in them, but the form, a sign of a good attitude towards us.

***

If you make wishes informally and seriously, then … One teacher of wisdom (we all meet such people from time to time, taking the form of relatives, colleagues and random fellow travelers) told me about magical technology. He argued that it is useless to wish for yourself or others what we absolutely do not have and never had. Such a wish has no chance to come true. For execution, the work of the imagination is needed, and the imagination is repelled by experience, even a minimal one. Therefore, when making your wish to someone, find in it at least a grain of what you want to wish, and refer to it. Then your wish will be warm, personal and friendly, and its power, perhaps, will produce some benefit in the life of your friend. That is, apparently, the wish for wealth should contain a reference to a recently performed successful operation, and the wish for health should contain a memory of the stormy energy that played in the addressee in those days when he himself, as a mischievous preschooler, ran around the yard.

And that teacher of wisdom said this: “It makes no sense to wish a person to be beautiful, because this is not his quality, but the quality of the views turned on him. He should also wish to develop in himself such an instinct that will allow him to find loyal and loving friends.

***

And it is interesting that there is only one fairy tale (about the Sleeping Beauty), which tells about an evil wish from the outside, and a great many stories that warn us against our own desires. Does this mean that the unmistakable option – “what you wish for yourself” – is actually not so safe? In the film “Stalker” they talk about Porcupine, who went to the deadly Zone and reached there a magical place where wishes come true, and asked his dead brother to return alive. And he came home – and received a lot of money. “It’s just that a person never really knows what he wants. The creature is complex. His head wants one thing, his spinal cord wants another, and his soul wants a third … And no one is able to figure this mess out, ”one of the characters comments on this event.

Everyone, probably, has heard (and more than once) the phrase “Beware of your desires, because they come true”! Frequent repetition elevated it to the rank of indisputable truth. Recently I tried to find out who said it. But it was not possible – those who quote refer to the ancients, some to folk wisdom. Perhaps this idea goes back to Honore de Balzac and his novel Shagreen Skin. His hero receives a certain mysterious artifact – a patch of shagreen (i.e. goat or mutton, a special dressing with a fine-grained pattern) skin that grants wishes, but with each new accomplishment decreases in size, which symbolizes the reduction in the life of its owner. And now the young man desires first wealth, then love, and, anticipating death, tries to stop his desires – but still he cannot stand it and dies, being seized by what we call simply “desire” without any clarifications – i.e. sexual attraction. For a young man, the fulfillment of desires turned out to be dangerous because his life was thus shortened. True, it is necessary to remember here: he received his magic item after he decided to commit suicide – that is, without shagreen, he would have to live only a few hours!

Or perhaps the above aphorism is rooted in the depths of time, to the teachings of Buddhism, two of the four noble truths of which are as follows: “There is suffering; there is a cause of suffering – desire. But there is a significant discrepancy here: the Buddha speaks of “restless dissatisfaction” or “insatiable longing”, i.e. about the danger of the desire itself, and not its fulfillment.

***

Well, I will continue my search – and someday, probably, I will find out who that strange person is who calls us to be afraid of the fulfillment of desires, and I will understand why he does this. In the meantime, I think that the danger is rather in something else – we do not always know how (we simply do not have the habit and skill) to wish ourselves what would really bring us joy. Like that girl from the joke who caught a goldfish and made three wishes: one – that she had a big, very big nose, the other – that she had hairy ears, and the third – that her eyes converged to the bridge of her nose. Rybka did everything, and then she says: “Oh, girl, but you could ask that you become smart, beautiful and marry a prince!” And the girl answers her: “What, it was possible, right ?!”

***

Several times, in front of my eyes, acquaintances “slid” past the fulfillment of desires. My classmate in love said that she wanted to give birth to a child precisely from this man, who in those days did not pay attention to her. Then they nevertheless got married, and they had a boy, but the young woman turned out to be unhappy in marriage and divorced her husband, never noticing that her wish had come true. Or here’s another story, not a love story, but a geographical one: my kindergarten friend Vladik dreamed of going to India and composed serial adventures that were supposed to happen to him there. We did not see each other for many years, and when we met, it turned out that he had been working in Delhi for several years. Of course, I immediately asked how happy he was when he got to the land of his dreams? Vlad was very surprised: he managed to completely forget about his childhood dream.

Sometimes I myself look around with interest, wondering: what of what I see is the result of desires that I forgot about?