Hunger

The economy of need hides in plain sight, in common words. I choose other words to distinguish my way, the way of Devotion.

I like the word hunger better than need, for what I’m bringing to any relationship when I describe a desire or make a request.

Hunger also has the acute state—starvation. When we use the word “need,” its urgency can span from preference to emergency.

Hunger, I can always, must always, take responsibility for, and I delight when others provide it.

Starvation describes a handicap, a dis-ability to assume responsibility alone, a requirement of intervention to arrest a life-threatening deficit and depletion.

There are those who speak of hungers and starvations as one, and ask their potential dinner-dates to deliver professional and precise nourishment to heal them of an acute condition, getting outraged when this fails.

But when we understand our own responsibility to ourselves and to others, we show our hungers palatably and heal our starvations.

With responsibility for our hunger, we establish a state of non-negotiable nourishment for ourselves.

We accept the task of our starvations and see professional help which is meant to address depletion.

We lower the stakes of intimate relationships.

We are simultaneously then free to share in hunger and feeding with others, where the only motivation is to delight in sharing that experience with each other.