You Can't Always Get

What You Want...

You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes
You just might find
You get what you need

~Mick Jagger & Keith Richards

I just love these lyrics and find a real truth in them that changes with age but never stops being relevant to me. It would be easy to dismiss these words as superficial, facile, simplistic…but I think that comes from a superficial reading of them. If you’ve actually had the experience of really wanting something badly…and then, after trying, at least “sometimes” to get it, realizing that you absolutely cannot have it…and then after really letting this in and surrendering to it…realizing that what you wanted wasn’t in fact, what you needed after all, and that, bitter or sweet, what you needed is what you got…well then, I think the song has more resonance.

I also really like the co-creative feeling of “if you try sometimes” and the uncertainty and mysterious quality of “you just might find”…I think it’s kind of an optimistic yet fatalistic and bittersweet embrace of life. You go after sex and love, you go after music, you go after friendship, you go after justice, you go after sweetness (or at least cherry soda)…and you find out what’s real and what’s not, what’s possible and what’s not, and maybe, if you don’t give up too soon, you might just get what you need.

I also like the idea that this is an ongoing and repetitive process, this whole interplay between what I want and what I need. The lessons I needed when I was 20 are not necessarily the lessons I need now.