What do you want?

...What do you want?

...W-h-a-t d-o y-o-u w-a-n-t?

This is the question that while your are reading is being asked over a billion times in approximately 6000 languages.

"What do you want?" is the question I have been trying to answer in the last six months.

But I was not alone in my quest, in fact, this is the inquiry I addressed to hundreds of people around the world...in the last six months...

....What do the farmer from Salta's province in Argentina,
the taxi drivers from Montevideo, Bangkok, Cairo and Rome,
the investment banker from Manhattan's Lexinghton E/24th,
the vintner from Toronto,
the policeman from Niagara,
the bartender of Luis's Café in Buffalo Bust station,
the Spanish-illiterate aboriginals from the Andean regions of Peru,
the Bolivian miner,
the Chilean globetrotter,
the Mexican young film director from Los Angeles,
the Brazilian phisio-therapist from San Paolo,
the Burman field guide in Yangon district,
the women Tonie Sap floating village in Cambodia,
the Libyan pilgrim on his mission across all the mosques of the Muslim world,
the Jewish orthodoxes crying on the wailing wall in Jerusalem during Passover,
the Thai Buddhist monks Chang Mai's temples
and many more like them coming from the most unconventional upbringings and all the walks of life have in common?

Looking back at me with quizzical expressions, eventually backfiring likely predictable questions, they all failed in giving me definite, categorical, palpable, precise and full answer.

I considered the likelihood that we need uncertainty and material comfort, fleeting happiness, health and wealth to carefully disguise what the real sense of the journey is...

...I would argue that our relationships with others, our possessions and goods are our finest, most credible expressions of who we are and what we offer, nothing else compares.

But what if, way beyond everything else, the primary and intimate desire that makes us feel extraordinary self - accomplished stems from finding what our mission is and striving hard for it, following our bliss? ...the bliss, that unique point where talents and desires intersect, putting us in a kind of track that has been there all the time, waiting for us, making the life that we ought to be living, the one we are living...

Unfortunately, the only ANSWER I came up with is just that warm and comfortable feeling that results from asking only those questions we can answer...

In that case, "What do you want?" is the most conventional and seemingly trivial question ever asked.

That being said, if you can do any better I would really much like to hear from you.

The bliss is a passionate calling, not an "obligation to be happy" accepting whatever comes down the pike: no matter what cards life deals to us, we should HONOR it, however outlandish it may seem...