Getting What You Want

Good morning, Everybody!  And good morning to the frost on my windshield!

One thing I love about the cold is that it keeps me inside doing things I've been saving for days like these.

Yesterday I made two soups and put them in containers to warm up for tonight's guests--four friends celebrating Gerlinde's birthday.  I loved chopping onions and garlic.  I love getting under the covers and reading when the house smells like simmering meat and vegetables.

Anyone my age, give or take a decade, knows the iconic Rolling Stones song,  "You can't always get what you want...But if you try sometimes, you get what you need."

It came to mind as I was watching "This is Us" and it's been looping over and over in my head ever since.  Betty and I love the father of the triplets in this series.  He's not perfect, but he's about as close to perfect as a woman might want in a man--so I'm pretty sure a woman made him up.

At Marga's party on Monday, she read a line from Picasso that goes along with the theme--she's going to translate it from German and send it to me and I'll give you the exact quote--but it goes something like this:

"Finding and searching are different things.  To search for something is to look for something lost, something stored away.  I go out to find-- to discover something new, something I didn't know was out there."

Marga  enjoys traveling solo.  Her friends were aghast when she took a trip to Berlin alone.  "Won't you be lonesome?  What if you get lost?"

"No," she said.  "In meandering around, I'll find new things, meet new people, experience things on my own.  There's no compromising about what to do, what to see, and if I see a path, I just take it."

I'm sure she also enjoys traveling with a good traveling companion.  But if the companion isn't interested in a particular trip, or if there is no companion with whom to travel, a solitary trip has its perks, too.

To search for the "perfect" man or the "perfect" house (or the castle or whatever described in the travel brochure) can be a set up for disappointment.  Rambling the back roads of life, you find people, out-of-the-way adventures and scenic views that are not pre-packaged: maybe imperfect, but yours for a moment or a lifetime.

Or--to combine Marga's, Picasso's, and the Rolling Stones: we don't always know what we want, but when we find it, it just may be what we need, or maybe even what we love.

*****

The Picasso Quotation

Pablo Picasso –

Quotation appears to have been listed in the volume Picasso:  Ueber Kunst  (Picasso: About Art) – published by Diogenes Verlag, Zuerich, 1988, an edited volume that contains excerpts from Picasso essays related to art & artists.

Text of quotation is in German; translation from German into English: M. Speicher, 2-28-15


I do not go searching – I find.

To go searching, that means to go looking for goods that had been stored & were used up

and wanting to find what is already known.

To find, that is the fully new.



All ways are open, and what is found is unknown.

It is daring, a holy adventure.



The uncertainty of such daring can be undertaken only by those who know that they are secure in insecurity,

who are guided in uncertainty,

who let themselves be pulled by the goal

and do not determine the goal themselves.