The Inverse Wish

“A shooting star! I wish for strength. I need to be strong to care for those I love.”

But you see, this is the game. This is the cosmic joke that the universe is playing on itself… through you.

Light cannot be seen without darkness. There is no top without a bottom, no front without a back. There is no strength without weakness. And if you really sit with that, not just as a clever idea, but as a felt reality… everything changes.

When a wish reaches the ears of the divine and is granted, two equal seeds are planted in your reality. Because that is the nature of existence. You cannot order one side of the coin.

To wish for strength, the universe, in its profound and mischievous wisdom, sends you weights. In many forms. It wears you out daily until you feel utterly weak. Because here is the secret: the seed of strength cannot germinate in comfortable soil. It demands challenge. Progressive resistance, each and every day. And so the game becomes not one of avoiding struggle, but of seeking it. Find something to push against. The obstacle is the path.

Had you wished for patience, you would not be handed a superpower - you would be handed a frustration. Had you wished for courage, you would not feel brave. You would simply find yourself standing at the edge of something terrifying, with no choice but to step forward.

For as long as I can remember, I wished for happiness. Every birthday, every falling star, every shimmering moment of magic. How very human of me. How very understandable.

But little did I know, I was rolling out the welcome mat for sadness and anger. After each wish, I would run to the front porch, heart wide open, buzzing with anxious anticipation waiting for happiness to arrive at the front door. And meanwhile, the back door would creak open quietly, and in would creep sadness and anger. Nesting. Forming mold in the corners I refused to look at.

Eventually I would come in off the porch and gasp. The misty sadness would fill my lungs. The house would appear unfixable, and so I would grab my belongings and move on to the next one. But my wish followed me. House after house, the mold returned. Wish after wish was for happiness and each wish, in its own strange way, was granted.

You see, the sadness was the incubation. The mold was the process. But I overlooked it, rejected it, fled from it… relentlessly.

The expectation of happiness without its opposite, the ignorance of duality, this is what clouded reality. We are so conditioned to want the peak without the valley, the exhale without the inhale.

And so my wishes now are not for happiness, not for love, not for strength but for the quest itself. For the thing that challenges me. For the friction.

After making this wish, I no longer stand on the front porch waiting. I stand guard at every entrance. I have stopped running from what creeps in through the back door. Instead, I meet it I identify it, I capture it and I transmute anger and sadness into rich, dark soil. The very soil from which happiness and love grow.

That is the inverse wish. And it is, perhaps, the only one worth making.

Keep reading: A related post - The Ultimate Invitation

Comments

Hugo the humbleJuly 2, 2026 at 3:50 AM
And the journey rises in significance to meet the importance of the destination, and all that is valuable was always to have been found inside your self. I am glad to witness your evolution.
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