How Longing Leads Us Back to Aliveness

Emancipation Code 1: I Allow What My Soul Still Reaches Toward

Jul 26, 2026

Our Longing is one of the ways aliveness announces itself.

It may not arrive with a plan. It may not be sensible, affordable, convenient or easy to explain. Sometimes it comes as a daydream that lingers after we’ve returned to ordinary life. It can also be a private attraction, a recurring image, a sudden ache, or a strange little pull toward something we thought we had outgrown.

At first, longing may feel impractical. That does not make it meaningless.

Something in us has leaned toward life.

Before We Rush to Silence It

I’ve been thinking about longing as I begin The Emancipation Codes because I don’t believe emancipation always starts with defiance. Often, it begins in a much quieter place. A woman notices what she wants before she rushes to silence it.

That pause matters.

What happens in you when longing appears?

Do you let yourself stay with it for a while? Does your mind begin to wander and make pictures? Do you imagine the place, the person, the room, the version of yourself who is living closer to the desire? Does your body respond before you’ve decided what anything means?

Longing can have a physical life. The breath changes. The chest opens or tightens. The heart quickens. Something warms, reaches, softens, or becomes alert. A younger self may come forward, carrying an old wish you thought had vanished.

Then something pops the bubble.

That’s impossible.

Too late.

Too expensive.

Too selfish.

Too foolish.

Move on.

The interruption can happen so quickly that it sounds like truth. But more often, it’s only a verdict. It’s the old reflex arriving before longing has had a chance to tell us what it’s carrying.

The Magic Carpet Dream

When I was a child, I once dreamed I was flying on a magic carpet over the most beautiful places in the world. I moved above waterfalls, deserts, gardens, rivers, and mountains. Warm wind carried my body. I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t need to explain why I was there. I was part girl, part bird, part spirit - moving through beauty without anyone calling me back down.

That dream has always stayed with me. It became a bodily longing. Even now, I can feel the exhilaration of it when I remember. The faster heartbeat. The openness. The sense that wonder itself could carry me.

That may be why I’ve always been drawn to travel, music, beauty, and the feeling of entering a world larger than the one I know how to manage. The longing wasn’t only for a destination. It was for freedom inside beauty. I was treasuring motion without depletion. It was for a life where awe was not treated as an indulgence.

Longing is often like that. It may show us an atmosphere before it shows us an action.

When Longing Comes Close to Choice

There are also ordinary longings that come very close to choice. The idyllic vacation, even if there’s no one to go with you. The beautiful shoes, even if buying them would make next month tighter than it needs to be. The impulse to say hello to the attractive person standing behind you in line.

None of these longings is automatically wise. None has to become a command. But each one asks a revealing question: what do I do when desire comes near enough to make me uncomfortable?

Do I become curious?

Do I begin imagining a path?

Do I let myself enjoy the possibility for a few minutes before turning it into a problem?

Or do I dismiss it before it can become a conversation?

There is a real difference between discernment and automatic denial.

Discernment listens before it decides. It can say yes, no, not now, not that way, or something underneath this matters. Automatic denial doesn’t listen. It closes the door and calls the closing mature.

Letting Longing Stay in the Room

I wrote about this recently when the possibility of going to the Algarve Jazz Festival stirred something in me. The question wasn’t only whether I should go. It was whether I would let the longing stay in the room long enough to understand what it was trying to show me.

I let it linger, and then I planned the trip, very tentatively. And then, as the pieces fell into place further affirming this direction, I went. And, wow, it was a wonderful experience which exceeded my expectations. I rested. I danced and reveled in the joyous music. I admired the other side of the vast Atlantic shoreline. I walked away with new friends when going alone was a huge challenge for me.

That distinction still feels important.

A longing for travel may not only be about travel. It may be about beauty, atmosphere, music, solitude, adventure, renewal, or the desire to experience oneself in a wider field. A longing for quiet may not be simple tiredness. It may be the soul asking for relief from constant availability. A longing for adornment may not be vanity. It may be the body remembering that pleasure, visibility and beauty are also forms of nourishment.

Longing often carries a message beneath its surface.

The Pattern Beneath the Longing

Longing may point toward an identity we wish to inhabit more fully. A writer. A mother. A world traveler. An artist. A beloved. A woman with more peace. A woman with more command. A woman who no longer apologizes for wanting a life that feels like her own.

Sometimes the longing is modest. A quiet hour. A morning without interruption. A room of one’s own. A day without being needed. A version of life that doesn’t require so much emotional management.

Patterns begin to appear when we pay attention.

What do I keep longing for?

What awakens me again and again?

What do I admire in other women that I have not allowed in myself?

What keeps returning as fantasy, envy, ache, attraction, or restlessness?

And perhaps the most revealing question is this: what do I do when the longing rises?

Do I let it breathe, or do I put it on trial?

Where Permission Enters

Longing seeks permission to become real. The question is: whose permission?

A woman may believe she is waiting for approval from someone else. Sometimes she is. Family, partnership, work, religion, culture, and community all have ways of telling women what is acceptable to want, say, display, refuse, or leave behind.

There is also a wider atmosphere around women that has always tried to manage the reach of female longing. Patriarchy isn’t only a set of external limits. Over time, it can become an inner climate. A girl learns to measure desire against acceptability. She learns how quickly pleasure can be judged. Her ambition can be softened, anger can be made more polite, and freedom can be treated as selfish unless it benefits someone else.

This is not the whole story, of course. Some girls are blessed with women who interrupt the pattern. A mother, aunt, sister, teacher, elder, or friend may model what it looks like to choose from the inside. She may show that a woman’s life does not have to be organized around apology.

But many of us have had to learn self-permission later. Even then, giving it to ourselves can feel strangely difficult. Sometimes it feels almost naughty, as if someone might catch us wanting too much. A woman may feel shy before her own desire, even in private. She may imagine the objections before anyone has spoken them. She may worry that wanting more will make her seem selfish, impractical, vain, irresponsible or unrecognizable.

Self-Permission Is Not Recklessness

It doesn’t ask us to abandon judgment, commitments or care for other people. It is not the same as chasing every bright thing that appears.

It is the inner allowance that says: let me hear this.

Let me see what this longing is made of.

Let me imagine without punishing myself.

Let me take one small movement, if one is honest and available.

Permission often begins as a gentle nudge, not a push. It is the quiet inner voice that says, “Why not?” or “Let’s see where this goes.” It may feel like a song you can’t quite get out of your head. Something keeps returning because it wants attention.

When longing is allowed to remain, it may become a vision. When that vision is infused with feeling, it begins to gather life. Not as a guarantee or a demand, but as a possibility that belongs to you long enough to be explored.

The Gift of Urgency

This is the first Emancipation Code: Do not dismiss the longing too quickly.

Let it show you what part of you is still alive. Let it reveal what has been postponed, muted, prohibited or made too costly to want. Let it just become inspiring information before it has to become a firm decision.

As a woman with more years behind me than ahead of me, I feel this differently now. When I was younger, longing could wait. Or at least I believed it could. There was always more time somewhere ahead, some later season when the conditions might be easier, the money more available, the courage more natural, and the explanation less necessary. And especially this — when I retire.

Youth can make postponement feel harmless. Aging has a way of clarifying what postponement has cost.

Aging can also harden the old withholds if we are not careful. The dreams we kept moving to the side can begin to look unrealistic simply because they have waited so long. The life we didn’t choose can start to feel like the only life available. Even longing itself may grow quieter, not because it has died, but because we have trained ourselves not to listen.

I don’t want to live that way.

At this stage of my life, longing feels less like fantasy and more like instruction. It’s not instruction in the sense that every desire must be fulfilled exactly as imagined. Some longings change form when we listen to them. Some reveal a need beneath the image. Some point toward a small restoration rather than a grand reinvention.

But I trust longing more than I used to.

I trust that it carries some evidence of aliveness. I trust that when something in us reaches, it is worth asking what it is reaching for. I trust that the soul does not keep tapping on the same window for no reason.

Longing may not always be the destination. Sometimes it is the messenger.

Longing is the bridge between the life we have managed and the life that still wants to meet us.

And perhaps the first act of permission is not to act immediately, or dramatically, or in defiance of everything we have built.

Perhaps it is simply this: to let the longing stay long enough to be heard, to allow it to warm the imagination, to feel where it lives in the body, to ask what part of our aliveness it is trying to return to us, and to stop treating that aliveness as something we must justify before we are allowed to follow it.

Because longing leads us toward the full experience of being alive.

And I want the life that remains to know that I listened.

Self-Inquiry: The Allowance of Longing

Take a quiet moment and think of one longing that has visited you more than once. It does not have to be dramatic. It may be a place, a creative desire, a relationship pattern, a kind of work, a room, a rhythm of life, or simply the wish to feel more alive in your own body.

Let yourself name it without explaining why it is impractical.

Then ask:

When did I first notice this longing?

How does it show up in me? As a daydream, envy, ache, irritation, admiration, grief, restlessness, or bodily excitement?

What happens in my body when I let myself imagine it?

What is the first thought that interrupts it?

Whose voice does that thought resemble?