The harder you chase something, the further it slips away. But the moment you release your grip, what you desire finds its way to you on its own.
True possession is never about ownership — it’s not even about having. The way I see it, the truest form of having is not having at all.
As children, we craved gifts. If our parents promised to buy us something in a few days, every kid I know would lie awake at night buzzing with excitement. But once the gift arrived and we played with it for a few days, the thrill faded. It became ordinary. We wanted something new — something better, something we’d never had before.
The same pattern follows us into adulthood. When you have ten thousand, you long for a hundred thousand. When you reach a million, a million starts to feel like nothing. You want more.
Money, at its core, exists to buy products and services. But when we finally have enough to buy what we want, the same childhood pattern repeats — a few days later, the novelty wears off.
Everyone dreams of a grand mansion. But I’m willing to bet that once you actually own one, the joy lasts weeks, maybe months — never a lifetime. Before long, you grow accustomed to it, even annoyed by how much space there is to clean, and you start thinking fondly of the small house you grew up in.
Why does possession drain a thing of its allure? Because when we don’t have something, the version we imagine is the ideal one — flawless, luminous, untouched by reality. That’s what “ideal” means: free of imperfections, made entirely of beauty. So everything — the luxury car, the private jet, the person you long for but can never quite reach — exists in its most perfect form precisely when it isn’t yours.
How many people have finally won the heart of the one they idealized, only to watch that feeling flatten into routine? Meanwhile, if you never quite got there — if the pursuit never ended — then decades later, when you’re in your sixties or seventies, the image of that person still glows in your mind, as radiant and tender as the day you first fell.
Choosing not to possess something doesn’t mean giving up the drive to strive. What matters more is learning to accept the outcome when you chase a dream and fall short. To be human is to carry ideals. We strive because we hope to make them real. But even if we never do, at least we can say we carried those ideals with us and lived our lives at peace with that.
Since I cannot have you, then stay in my mind — and be the most singular existence in this entire universe.
I want to close with a thought on youth: you cannot possess youth and the feeling of youth at the same time. Only after we’ve grown up — long past the invisible line between adolescence and adulthood — do we look back and wish we’d treasured it more.
I miss my elementary school years, my middle school years, my high school years. They live on in my memory, and my memory has a habit of keeping only the most beautiful fragments. Wait — I can recall the painful ones too. What’s going on?
It turns out that the memories of setback and suffering are the very pieces that complete the puzzle of who we are today…
Spring blessings from the other side of the world
Zhengyang Yao
Santa Clara
February 14, 2026
