chess.

"I have one simple response: give it up. If you don't think you're also playing chess against God, then prove it by letting go of the things that provide you with a sense of security, or comfort, or excitement, or relief. You will soon discover the tentacles of attachment deep in your soul. There will be an anxiousness; you will begin to think about work or food or golf even more. Withdrawal will set in. If you can make it a week or two out of sheer willpower, you will find a sadness growing in your soul, a deep sense of loss. Lethargy and a lack of motivation will follow. Remember, we will make an idol out of anything, especially a good thing. So distant are we now from Eden, we are desperate for life, and we come to believe that we must arrange for it as best we can, or no one will. God must thwart us to save us.

. . .we are still committed to arranging for life now. . . We don't even set our hope partially on the life to come. Not really, not in the desires of our hearts. Heaven may be coming. Great. But, it's a long way off and who really knows, so I'm getting what I can now.

. . .Many people were shattered by Brent's death. I know I was. Not even on my worst enemies would I wish such pain. But I also know this: the shattering was good. Living apart from God comes naturally; all the striving and arranging is so second-nature to me that to have it stopped in its tracks was a great good. I would wake in the morning in those early days of grief, and instead of my desires "rushing at me like a pack of wild animals" as Lewis said, I knew it can't be done. I knew it more personally than I had ever known it before. We must learn this lesson, at whatever cost, or the spell will not be broken and we will never discover true hope.

. . ."Remember how the LORD your God lead you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart . . .He humbled you, causing you to hunger" (Deuteronomy 8:2-3). During my "chess matches" with God, I often wrestled with his reasons for thwarting my dreams and desires. I am serving you faithfully, God. Why won't you let me have this little pleasure? It felt to me so unfair, even cruel.

. . .As I allowed myself to feel that quiet and long-buried desire, a sentence popped up out of my heart: I could really be happy here without God.

I haven't wanted to be an eternal person. I've wanted to find true life here somehow.

Pascal observed, "We are never living, but hoping to live; and whilst we are always preparing to be happy, it is certain, we never shall be so, if we aspire to no other happiness than what can be enjoyed in this life."

-The above passages are taken from the book Desire, by John Eldredge

.....''What I meant was a particular recurrent experience which dominated my childhood and adolescence and which I hastily called ‘Romantic’ because inanimate nature and marvelous literature were among the things that evoked it.  I still believe that the experience is common, commonly misunderstood, and of immense importance: but I know now that in other minds it arises under other stimuli and is entangled with other irrelevancies and that to bring it into the forefront of consciousness is not so easy as I once supposed.  I will now try to describe it sufficiently to make the following pages intelligible.

The experience is one of intense longing.  It is distinguished from other longings by two things.  In the first place, though the sense of want is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight.  Other desires are felt as pleasures only if satisfaction is expected in the near future: hunger is pleasant only while we know (or believe) that we are soon going to eat.  But this desire, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it.  This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth.  And thus it comes about, that if the desire is long absent, it may itself be desired, and that new desiring becomes a new instance of the original desire, though the subject may not at once recognize the fact and thus cries out for his lost youth of soul at the very moment in which he is being rejuvenated.  This sounds complicated, but it is simple when we live it.  ‘Oh to feel as I did then!’ we cry; not noticing that even while we say the words the very feeling whose loss we lament is rising again in all its old bitter-sweetness.  For this sweet Desire cuts across our ordinary distinctions between wanting and having.  To have it is, by definition, a want: to want it, we find, is to have it.

In the second place, there is a peculiar mystery about the object of this Desire.  Inexperienced people (and inattention leaves some inexperienced all their lives) suppose, when they feel it, that they know what they are desiring.  Thus if it comes to a child while he is looking at a far off hillside he at once thinks ‘if only I were there’; if it comes when he is remembering some event in the past, he thinks ‘if only I could go back to those days’.  If it comes (a little later) while he is reading a ‘romantic’ tale or poem of ‘perilous seas and faerie lands forlorn’, he thinks he is wishing that such places really existed and that he could reach them.  If it comes (later still) in a context with erotic suggestions he believes he is desiring the perfect beloved.  If he falls upon literature (like Maeterlinck or the early Yeats) which treats of spirits and the like with some show of serious belief, he may think that he is hankering for real magic and occultism.  When it darts out upon him form his studies in history or science, he may confuse it with the intellectual craving for knowledge.

But every one of these impressions is wrong.  The sole merit I claim for this book is that it is written by one who has proved them all to be wrong.  There is no room for vanity in the claim: I know them to be wrong not by intelligence buy by experience, such experience as would not have come my way if my youth had been wiser, more virtuous, and less self-centered than it was.  For I have myself been deluded by every one of these false answers in turn, and have contemplated each of them earnestly to discover the cheat.  To have embraced so many false Florimels is no matter for boasting: it is fools, they say, who learn by experience.  But since they do at least learn, let a fool bring his experience into the common stock that wiser men profit by it.

Every one of these supposed objects for the Desire is inadequate to it.  An easy experiment will show that by going to the far hillside you will get either nothing, or else a recurrence of the same desire which sent you thither.  A rather more difficult, but still possible, study of your own memories, will prove that by returning to the past you could not find, as a possession, that ecstasy which some sudden reminder of the past now moves you to desire.  Those remembered moments were either quite commonplace at the time (and owe all their enchantment to memory) or else were themselves moments of desiring.  The same is true of the things described in the poets and marvelous romancers.  The moment we endeavor to think out seriously what it would be like if they were actual, we discover this.  When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claimed to have photographed a fairy, I did not, in fact, believe it: but the mere making of the claim–the approach of the fairy to within even that hailing distance of actuality–revealed to me at once that if the claim had succeeded it would have chilled rather than satisfied the desire which fairy literature had hitherto aroused.  Once grant your fairy, your enchanted forest, your satyr, faun, wood-nymph and well of immortality real, and amidst all the scientific, social and practical interest which the discovery would awake, the Sweet Desire would have disappeared, would have shifted its ground, like the cuckoo’s voice or the rainbow’s end, and be now calling us beyond a  further hill.  With Magic in the darker sense (as it has been and is actually practiced) we should fare even worse.  How if one had gone that way–had actually called for something and it had come?  What would one feel? Terror, pride, guilt, tingling excitement … but what would all that have to do with our Sweet Desire? It is not at Black Mass or séance that the Blue Flower grows.  As for the sexual answer, that I suppose to be the most obvious Florimel of all.  On whatever plane you take it, it is not what we are looking for.  Lust can be gratified.  Another personality can become to us ‘our America, or our New-found-land’.  A happy marriage can be achieved.  But what has any of the three, or any mixture of the three, to do with the unnamable something, the desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves?

It appeared to me therefore that if a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given–nay, cannot even be imagined as given–in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.  This Desire was, in the soul, as the Siege Perilous in Arthur’s castle–the chair in which only one could sit.  And if nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit on this chair must exist.  I knew only too well how easily the longing accepts false objects and through what dark ways the pursuit of them leads us: but I also saw that the Desire itself contains the corrective of all these errors.  The only fatal error was to pretend that you had passed from desire into fruition, when, in reality, you had found either nothing, or desire itself, or the satisfaction of some different desire.  The dialectic of Desire, faithfully followed, would retrieve all mistakes, head you off from all false paths, and force you not to propound, but to live through, a sort of ontological proof.  This lived dialectic, and the merely argued dialectic of my philosophical process, seemed to have converged on one goal; accordingly I tried to put them both into my allegory which thus became a defense of Romanticism (in my peculiar sense) as well as of Reason and Christianity.''
–C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress