What I want is not always what I really want.
I forget this a great deal of the time. You see, I am easily confused by what is near to me or most pressing on my mind at the moment. I often confuse my own immediate wants and needs with the things that I really want or need - like trying to pull a scab off for relief when what I really need is to let it stay there and heal.
This is more dangerous than I like to let myself believe - giving the reins to my immediate wants is the sort of thing that has gotten me into bad places in the past? Why is this? Because I convince myself that what I need, I need now. And when this happens it has seldom gone as well as I might have hoped for myself.
The key is to understand what I really want. Or need.
Polling myself on this things is difficult. I can be a biased respondent. For example, I could easily convince myself that what I want is to not do what I am doing now. But given my tendency to act as soon as I think of that, that chain of logic leads me to throwing a letter across someone's desk this morning. But that is not what I really want - what I really want is an engaging career, which is hardly found by an abrupt change in employment.
Sometimes the confusion of one for the other is relatively harmless. But sometimes it is not so harmless - sometimes, in fact, such things can be inadvertently life changing. And the same kind of logic applies - I want this, so I need to do something about this right now.
The true adult - the mature person - is able to wade through all of these wants and needs. They are able to take each in hand, examine it dispassionately, and make an assessment as to what is truly required in their life. They seldom make the precipitous decision that cause wild swings in the nature of the existence. If needed, how do we get there quickly? If wanted, is it a true want? I would think that they seldom confuse wants with needs because they are able to look at things as they truly are.
Would that we all had this kind of insight.
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