In lots of old fairy-stories people make wishes - on their birthdays or other occasions! What they wish for is either granted or capriciously frustrated. One old story is of a husband and wife who are granted the three traditional wishes, but, like every couple, they can't agree on what to wish for. The wife says in frustration, "I wish your nose was on top of your head!" The wish, of course, is granted immediately. Horrified, she wishes that she hadn't wished her husband's nose removed. She wishes that her husband's nose is put back where it belongs, but now, two wishes are gone. Two strikes against them before they even got their heads clear so the fairy wand is mightier than the baseball bat! This is the wishy-washy aspect of our fantasies and vaguer desires where we never quite know what to ask of life, or of ourselves, or of other people. Once we do get what we want, we don't quite want what we've got. Of course, Freud saw the whole business of wishing as basically infantile and escapist. I'm more in sympathy with Bruno Bettelheim - you may remember his book, "The Uses of Enchantment" where the business of wishing is an imaginative, creative, and healing function, whether with children or adults. The fountain of wishes is ageless.
We see in the wishes of our children both infantile wishes and fantasies which help kids deal with reality more than escape it. Even in adult life we don't necessarily know the consequences of what we are wishing for. Oscar Wilde told the story of a man who desperately wished to be Prime Minister. "And", he said to a friend, "do you know the terrible thing that happened to this man?" "No," said the friend intrigued and fascinated. "Well," said Wilde, "he became Prime Minister!" The lesson here is that what we wish for in life we don't necessarily need for our own good, and what we really need for our emotional health, we may never come to wish. Life is full of genuine, undiscovered wishes as it is of frustrated and often false desire. Wishing is neither a resolution of the mind nor an act of will. Wishing has a deeply unconscious, but highly creative and healing component.
True wishing is to our psychic and emotional health - what breathing is to the body. Yes, some of our wishes are infantile, but some carry clues to deeper happiness and self- fulfillment. As Coleridge wrote somewhere:
What if you slept? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a rare and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Oh, what then?
In truth, our very best wishes and truest dreams, however we understand them now, however we have accepted or dismissed them in the past, are still alive within us as a kind of divine restlessness. If there was nothing left to wish for, we would not wish, but we can never bury the true loves and ideals - the precious wishes - which were the testament of our youth. We only bury them alive. Behind today's wish is a healing image or fragment of myself - or is it a fragment of myself awaiting healing? In fairy-stories, the water in the wishing well is the water of healing. In the mood of life resignation it is sometimes difficult to accept that old wishes, contain the seeds of new possibilities and difficult to accept that wishes are not just aimless butterflies, but may point in the direction of deeper self-realization. Recurring wishes are like recurring dreams. "Doctor, why is it I keep dreaming the same dream?" Answer, "because you didn't hear its message the first time." Wishing, however childish, is always to be preferred to sophisticated apathy. It is a struggling for breath, for the truer touch of friends, for the smell of flowers, and for the soft west-wind blowing through our lives gain. It is the wish for larger meaning: "All suddenly the wind blows soft/and spring is here again..."
Have we always sought the meaning and purpose of life in the right place? Have we wished for the right thing? Sometimes yes and sometimes no. In terms of my first wish, I asked for love in my life, sincerity in my wider relationships and the gift of loving others. There were days, literally, when I prayed for such things. In terms of my second wish, I asked for success in my career, my goals, and my undertakings. In a word, I wanted to be known and accepted as a loving and successful human being. I also wished forgiveness for some of the follies of my youth. What more could I ever ask for on my birthday whether at 30, 40, 50, or 60? So much accomplished at any given point - in love and career - and things left undone.
Now, the good fairy grants three wishes. A Third Wish? I have experienced love, though I know love is a restless thing, and I wish for something beyond the successes I have achieved. I certainly seek the redemption of my failures. There may certainly be something beyond the disappointments of life, confessed or unconfused; and some wish to heal the uninvited pain which comes to all of us. We don't necessarily wish the kingdom of heaven in a world to come, but healing and wholeness here and now. And what of the curious loneliness at heart even in my moments of self-approval? It feels as if I'm playing the game of life with some of the pieces missing. "Is this all there is?" I say in the words of Peggy Lee's old song. I follow the rules to secure a firmer structure for my relationships and my goals, and yet my life looks more and more like the leaning tower of Pisa! If I'm lucky, I may have developed a sense of humor to help me deal with all the ironies of disappointment and the even stranger ironies of uninvited love and success. And if I'm especially lucky, I'm able to feel an unaffected thankfulness for the things in my life that are, and have been, gracious, life-giving, and lovely. If I'm very, very lucky, I shall know what it is to accept myself and be truly accepted - at least once- in moments of pure and genuine grace.
Out of or beyond the circular triumphs, disappointments, and the sheer ironies of my first two wishes, I have become more thoughtful. What have I been looking for all along? Have I tried to measure life, love, and career on a scale of 1-10? Is it possible that I have paid too much to quench my thirst to be loved and accepted by others? I have paid religion the compliment of taking it seriously, but has religion taken me seriously? Religion tells me what to do, not how to be. Has it spoken to my soul? I have paid society the compliment of subscribing to its rules, but does society care a whit about my individuality as distinct from my continuing usefulness. Even as I'm surrounded by love, affection, and respect there is a certain core of my being neither loved by others nor understood by myself. But now I begin to grasp that though I need to be loved, it can never again be at the cost of myself, that though I wish success it cannot be at the expense of myself. We must compromise with the world it is true, but there is all the difference in the world between conscious and unconscious compromise - beware and confuse them not - and between gaining one's life and losing it.
By now, the nature and importance of the Third Wish perhaps becomes clearer: that you more truly wish to be yourself; that as you love and admire other people, you also give thought to the potential beauty, depth, and meaning of your own life as it unfolds; that you recognize your own deep decency and worth; that you be tolerant and wisely forgiving of your own frailties, able to regard yourself as a gracious and grace-bearing person. When did you last do so? When did you last give yourself a dozen roses? So step back a little from the well-worn first two wishes. They're still real and won't go away, but they will be lent in depth, color, and humor by your Third Wish which suffuses the first two wishes with a new light of morning and meaning. For the more sincerely we wish this Third Wish - to more truly be ourselves - the more likely we are to achieve our social goals without bitterness, hold our ideals without self- righteousness, and the more likely we are to find new intensities of love and meaning for which our lives were made.