This is a question I have been thinking about for a long time, and one I keep returning to with curiosity.
Before I begin, I want to clarify whose ambitions I am thinking about.
For someone living hand to mouth, struggling to put food on the table, the need is immediate: a meal, and the reassurance that there will be another tomorrow. There is an unmistakable honesty in that hunger. It needs no elaborate explanation.
My question concerns those of us who have enough to meet our basic needs and can look beyond them: what do we keep searching for once we have enough to eat?
We spend enormous parts of our lives trying to achieve something.
Someone wants to invent something remarkable. Someone wants to crack an impossible code. Someone wants the highest position in an organisation. Someone trains for years to win a gold medal.
Different ambitions. Different mountains.
But I suddenly wondered: what happens after we reach the top?
We celebrate. We eat something we love. We take a holiday. We make life more comfortable. We sit somewhere beautiful with people we care about.
After all the complexity of achievement, the reward often becomes surprisingly simple.
Good food. Rest. Comfort. Time. Experience.
Much of it reaches us through the senses: a delicious meal, the warmth of sunlight, music, a familiar voice, the pleasure of being somewhere we have always wanted to visit.
Perhaps achievement is abstract, but its enjoyment is often deeply physical.
A body that hungers, a mind that imagines
We have a physical body with recurring needs, alongside an extraordinary capacity for conscious experience. Our brains contain roughly 86 billion neurons, supporting a life of memory, imagination, learning and anticipation.
With so much going on within us, perhaps it is hardly surprising that we find it difficult to sit quietly and feel that nothing more needs to be done.
The body asks for nourishment. The mind can imagine a thousand ways to seek satisfaction.
We become curious. We explore. We discover something we want to understand, create or accomplish. A possibility becomes a goal, and the goal becomes an achievement to pursue.
Then comparison can enter the picture.
How far have others gone? Could I do better? Am I falling behind?
Alongside it comes the awareness that our time is limited:
I have this short life. Surely I must do something with it.
There is nothing unreasonable about that. Learning, creating and contributing can give life purpose. Competition can sometimes encourage us to stretch ourselves. The work itself may bring profound satisfaction.
Yet I find the whole process strange and worth exploring: how a living body’s needs become intertwined with ambitions, identities and elaborate ideas about success.
Our hunger acquires many forms.
We want food, but also recognition. We want shelter, but also status. We want companionship, but also the reassurance that we matter.
And somewhere within our striving, there may be a quieter promise:
Once I get there, I can relax. I can enjoy life. I will finally have some freedom.
How much of our achievement is an attempt to reach that feeling?
What are we trying to feed?
And then I remembered something Neem Karoli Baba reportedly said to Ram Dass.
In Miracle of Love, Ram Dass recalls asking Maharaj-ji why he fed so many people and offered so much food. Part of the reply reads:
“We have an inner thirst for food… your soul has a thirst for food.”
Those words stayed with me.
I cannot claim to know exactly what Maharaj-ji intended. But they invite me to think about how deeply the simple act of eating can satisfy us.
A meal nourishes the body. When offered with care, it can also make us feel welcomed, remembered and loved.
After a difficult day, a long journey or an exhausting effort, there can be something wonderfully complete about sitting down to food we enjoy. For a moment, we may stop reaching for the next thing.
Perhaps that is what I mean when I say that food can make the soul happy: the feeling that something within us has been nourished, and we can briefly rest in being alive.
I do not mean that food answers every human longing. We need love, meaning, dignity and connection too.
But it fascinates me that, after so many sophisticated pursuits, such an ordinary act can bring such deep contentment.
We accumulate qualifications, promotions, money, awards and recognition. Beneath those pursuits, what are we hoping to receive?
Security? Belonging? Freedom? A little relief from the feeling that we have not yet done enough?
Achievement can improve our lives and give us choices we did not have before. But can it satisfy a need we have never properly named?
Maybe the question worth asking is:
“What inside me do I expect this achievement to feed?”
Remembering what makes the climb worthwhile
I do not think we need to stop climbing.
There is joy in learning, inventing, solving problems and discovering what we are capable of. There is value in using our brief lives to do something meaningful.
But perhaps we can pursue those things while remembering the person beneath the ambition: a physical being who gets hungry, tired and lonely, and who needs care.
Sometimes the destination we are racing towards includes something remarkably ordinary: a good meal, a little rest, someone we love beside us, and the freedom to enjoy being alive.
Perhaps we spend years climbing mountains only to discover that some of what we were looking for was waiting quietly at the dinner table.
-Ash
Sources: Ram Dass, Miracle of Love: Stories about Neem Karoli Baba; see also “Of Miracles and Maharaj-ji” on Ram Dass’s official website. The quotation is shortened with an ellipsis. The approximate neuron count comes from Azevedo and colleagues’ 2009 study. The reflections and interpretations above are my own.
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