Consider the possibility that nothing is missing. Not that there will be enough eventually, once a few more things are in place. Not that anybody should learn to make do with less than they wanted. That there is nothing absent at all, that there never was, and that the entire search has been for something already present in the room.
Most people cannot hold this idea for more than a few seconds. It slides straight off, and something rejects it immediately without examining it. What rejects it is the list, because the list is the most familiar object in a modern life and it does not survive this thought at all.
Whether the thought is true cannot be settled here and it will not be claimed. What can be said is that it is worth sitting with for considerably longer than we normally allow it to stay before finding a reason to set it down.
The list is the comfortable part
A list of what is missing is a wonderful thing to have. It explains everything at once. Why today is not right. Why the feeling has not come yet. Why the peace is still somewhere ahead rather than here. And it contains a promise, which is that once these particular items are obtained, the whole condition will resolve itself.
Without the list a person would have to look at what is actually here, and what is actually here is much harder to face, because it cannot be improved by acquisition and offers nothing to do. So the list is not really a list of requirements at all. It is a way of postponing a look, indefinitely, with everybody's full approval and encouragement.
And notice that the list has never once got shorter. Items are removed from it constantly, some of them at great cost. It has stayed exactly the same length for twenty years. If a list refills itself every single time it empties, then its function was never emptying, and that should have been noticed a great deal earlier.
What is actually being looked for
What is anybody really seeking? Not the specific things, which vary from person to person and from decade to decade. Underneath the specific things. Take any item on the list and ask what it will actually give, and then ask what that will give, and keep going patiently, and a very small number of answers arrive.
Peace. Being at ease. Not having to prove anything to anybody. Being understood. Being able to stop. Having arrived there, the question changes completely, because not one of those has ever been available in a shop, and no quantity of the things on the list has ever produced a single one of them for anybody.
We are absolute already. That is worth believing even though it cannot be proved and almost nobody lives as though it were true. We are simply not aware of it, and the entire arrangement of our attention is designed to keep us unaware. Every time anybody gets anywhere near it, somebody offers them a very reasonable next thing.
What would have to change
Nothing would have to be acquired, and that is exactly what makes it so difficult. Every other project in a life has steps and can be worked at, and effort is something almost everybody is good at and comfortable with. This one has no steps, and effort makes it worse rather than better, because effort is the search, and the search is the thing standing in the way.
All that would have to happen is a look. Not a course, not a withdrawal from anything, not a change of circumstances, not a quieter year. Simply to stop for long enough to see what is actually here, without immediately measuring it against what is not here. That sounds like the easiest thing in the world and it is the one thing almost nobody manages.
People do have a handful of moments like that. They do not last, and they cannot be produced deliberately however carefully the conditions are reconstructed. In each of them there is nothing whatsoever that is wanted, not because anything has been renounced, but because the wanting is simply not there and its absence is not a lack of any kind. Then it comes back, and the list is waiting, exactly the same length as before.
