Hunger demolishes ideology.
-- Author Unknown

When you’re hungry, sometimes you’ll eat just about anything in sight. Things you never thought would taste good going down whet your appetite. You forget about food labels that list the ingredients present and nutrients absent. You stop thinking about fully balanced meals of carbs, fruits, vegetables, and protein. You might even shirk your vegan diet and wolf down a pork chop and bologna sandwich on Challah while watching a rodeo on a pig farm when you’re really hungry.

Okay, maybe not. But think about that same sense of hunger in relation to love. When love has been missing from your life, when you’ve been starving for affection, attention, and companionship, needing someone to hold you, hug you, and love you, to confirm you are alive and indeed lovable, you find yourself reaching out and grabbing anything breathing despite how wrong or dissatisfying you know it may be. It may come at you with a prefixed label that says “beware,” “bad news,” or “stay away;” it may be connected with something unseemly and unhealthy; it may even be attached legally to someone else. But when hunger for love – deep and gut-wrenching hunger – screams so loudly it drowns out any reservations your good sense may have, you settle for whatever just to feel love.

But just as eating the wrong foods will still leave you empty of vital nourishment, so will the wrong person in the space of your life yet leave you starving for love that’s rich, real, filling, and gratifying. Hunger of any kind should be treated delicately and deliberately with only that which provides ample sustenance and respects your values and practices.

No matter how great the need, never give up what you believe or compromise your Self just to fulfill that need, no matter how essential, biological, or desirable. Hold out for nourishment as nothing is more filling than satisfying that need AND hanging on to your integrity. Besides, anything less will leave you still wanting.

Sadiqqa © 2008