Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a Heaven for?

- Robert Browning (1812-1889). "Andrea del Santo," 1. 97, Men and Women, 1855

What happens once you achieve a dream of yours? You rest on your laurels for a while, but sooner or later, you prepare a new goal. As human beings, we are always changing, always expanding into the future. Our 'reach' in this world is what we can achieve, and our 'grasp' is what we will achieve. This quote simply says that we are not perfect, and that we cannot reach perfection. The heaven he speaks of may as well be the heaven of our own mind, our own ideals. It is not just something we picture in our minds - it is also something we yearn for with our bodies. We become bored with what we have, and try to escape our boredom by becoming engrossed in things. Sometimes this is something for the mind, like a story or a problem, and sometimes this is something for the body, like food or music. 

The realization that the achievement of your goal will not bring lasting happiness is one which can drive some of us to despair. We can, with this in mind, look at one of our own goals and see, not the positive which comes out of the realization of that fact, but the negative which arises: Fulfilling our goal will not solve all of our problems. Some problems will certainly be better, and we will probably be better off in some ways, but the realization of the sheer amount of work, luck, and camaraderie which would be required to make a Heaven of the earth is mind-boggling. How much easier to give up, to accept our limited powers, and to place our sights on a small, and achievable goal. One which perhaps doesn't win us much, but also doesn't lose us much. We take the low-risk gambles, because we are just trying to survive on earth, not achieve some sort of living perfection. Leave perfection for death, for the hypothetical heaven, and not the present one, which couldn't possibly last anyway. 

Why, though, do we have the idea of a Heaven? Why do we have vision in our heads of perfect outcomes? Perhaps it is because these visions drive us to do better than we ought. If we always accepted the low-risk gambles in life, then what would our life be like today? Perhaps this is only a question which we can answer for ourselves, but as for me, I think that I would be more miserable than I am today. Failing at achieving a goal feels horrific, but what may be worse is knowing that you never even tried. Fear is the whip, hope is the carrot, and we are the donkey in between the two, with our human nature. I don't really feel that I have anything profound to say here, just that I am rather glad that my reach exceeds my grasp, and not the other way around. When it is the case that what I will achieve is more than what I would want to achieve, I am always pleasantly surprised and grateful, but in a humble fashion, not in a way that inspires me to want to achieve more. It is precisely my ability to imagine what cannot be that pushes me to achieve what I can. I moderate my expectations from the ideal, and seek something more like a Heaven on Earth, than a Earth in Heaven. 

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