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else. They lose self-possession and freedom. The prolific letter-writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton noticed this was happening to him during his college years at Columbia University. Later in life, he wrote: “The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.”3
But the tension between thick and thin always remains. Every artist has experienced it. They may have had a lifelong desire to tell the truth, to make art that expresses something important. Yet they have a competing desire to sell their work in the marketplace, to be accepted, to be praised, to get reviews, to stay on top of trends that can change from year to year, month to month, day to day. The latter are superficial desires that, if allowed to accumulate, can completely obscure the thick ones. Sometimes it takes a particular event to shake those thin desires out of us.
The American author and educator Parker Palmer writes, “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”7
When President Kennedy told the American people, “We choose to go to the Moon,” he modeled a desire that surpassed what people had previously dared to entertain. “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things,” he said, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
Desires are discerned, not decided. Discernment exists in the liminal space between what’s now and what’s next. Transcendent leaders create that space in their own lives, and in the lives of the people around them.
Within a few years, the company realized that its search results were not just data points about what people happened to be trying to find at any given time but early indications about what people wanted—information about their desires, which Google had access to before anyone else. Google pioneered what Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism.16 Companies that operate according to this model translate private human experience into behavioral data that can then be used to engineer their desires, or at least to exploit them for profit.17
Ideologies are closed systems of desire. They provide clear constraints about what is acceptable or not acceptable to want—whether it is the platform of a political party, the guiding ideology of a company, or the ideology that shapes a family system.
Meditative thought, on the other hand, is patient thought. It is not the same thing as meditation. Meditative thought is simply slow, nonproductive thought. It’s not reactionary. It’s the kind of thought that, upon hearing news or experiencing something surprising, doesn’t immediately look for solutions. Instead, it asks a series of questions that help the asker sink down further into the reality: What is this new situation? What is behind it? Meditative thought is patient enough to allow the truth to reveal itself.
