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Lately, my brain can’t stop but muses about how we carry around these invisible maps of places we have never been; lives we haven’t lived, but feel we are owed. It reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s fig tree analogy from The Bell Jar. She described sitting under a tree, watching the wonderful figs branching out before her; each representing a wonderful future that she could lead. One was a husband and a happy home, another a famous poet, and another an amazing professor. But because she couldn’t choose just one, she stayed there staring, as the figs blackened and dropped at her feet. This analogy represents a haunting image of how longing for everything can leave us with nothing. We spend so much time paralyzed by the potential of the life we long for that we forget to taste the fruit that is already ripe in our hands. 

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” - Rumi

Maybe the same applies to the concept of contentment. We build these barriers of “someday” and hypothetical “if only” around us, and we become convinced that the life we long for is just over the horizon, within arm’s reach. There is a name for this mental trap. Psychologists call it the Focusing Illusion, where our tendency is to believe that one specific change will fix our entire existence. We think if we just grabbed the “right” fig, everything would be perfect. But research on happiness suggests our internal “set point” is surprisingly stubborn. It makes me wonder: is life short, or is it just that we spend so much of it looking at the branches instead of the ground we are standing on?

Both are valid, but both are apparitions at the end of the day. Sometimes we feel that a change of place changes everything, as if a new zip code could outrun an old habit of the soul. But there is a quiet peace in realizing that longing doesn’t mean emptiness; it just provides you with the motivation to move forward in life. It doesn’t mean where we are is “wrong.” It just means that we are capable of so much more, and it is unfair to our existence to put a boundary on our potential.

The poet Mary Oliver asked, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Lately, some of us are tempted simply “to let it be.” To stop treating the present like a waiting room for a better version of myself. When we let go of the original blueprint, the messy, unpolished reality of your present starts to look a lot more like the life we were looking for all along. It is neutral, it is flawed, but it is yours and finally enough.