If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting.
Interpretation
Desire and prolonged waiting can consume you, changing your identity and priorities.
This quote reflects on how intense longing and the anticipation for something over time can lead to an all-consuming focus on that desire. As one invests significant emotional energy into wanting something, it can overshadow other aspects of life and even transform one's identity and sense of self, suggesting that protracted desire may not always yield a positive outcome.
In practice
During a motivational speech about overcoming obstacles, one can use this quote to discuss the dangers of becoming too fixated on a goal.
...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.
Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
So little time we live in Time,_x000D_ _x000D_ And we learn all so painfully,_x000D_ _x000D_ That we may spare this hour's term_x000D_ _x000D_ To practice for Eternity.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Although the masters make the rules for the wise men and the fools, I've got nothing, Ma, to live up to.
Don't mistake activity with achievement.
An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave.
I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.
We say no to a lot of things so we can invest an incredible amount of care on what we do.
Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance. If we are holding back from any part of our experience, if our heart shuts out any part of who we are and what we feel, we are fueling the fears and feelings of separation that sustain the trance of unworthiness. Radical Acceptance directly dismantles the very foundations of this trance.
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