“Blessed are they which hunger and thirst after righteousness,” the verse in the Gospels goes, “for they shall be filled.”

Righteousness. A powerful word nigh impossible for puny, limited human beings to live out.

But we do ourselves a disservice, I think, to overlook the words that come before that.

The central idea here, even before morality and perfection is concerned, is that those who hunger and thirst — a state of being they consciously allow to exist within themselves (the “after righteousness” clause contextualizes and limits the subject of said hunger within the Beatitudes) — are blessed because of that very hunger.

Not lust. Not envy. Not desperation. Not “I guess so…” Not wanting, desiring, wondering. Not having itching tastebuds or picking up an extra coffee on a hectic afternoon.

Real hunger, real thirst. The kind you feel after not eating for days on end or not drinking any liquids for over thirty hours. Irrelevant distractions fall away; your senses sharpen; your body and mind become alert, observant, ready.

When you are hungry for something, you look for that thing everywhere you are, it comes up in your conversations without premeditation, you go to bed with it and wake up with it, it effortlessly slips into the frames you place around your experiences of reality.

Perhaps this state does not need to be constant throughout one’s day-to-day — it is good to feel rested and content from time to time. But a fulfilling, intentional life is impossible without hunger intensifying and directing the living.

So I have observed and experienced so far.

Over a lifetime, the things one hungers after change and shift. Much of aging well is in learning to recognize and flow with such shifts. Maturity, then, might be understood as the deepening and purification of the things one thirsts for.

But one must hunger to have a blessed life — one must first thirst to know how sweet a glass of water tastes — before one is to know righteousness or attain it, one must first become aware of the aching emptiness that cries out to be filled and to allow themselves to seek for that fulfilment.

Some people do not seem to feel the hunger, though — there are sparks of desire here and there, perhaps when a woman in a red dress brushes past their shoulder, perhaps when they notice the calm, deep happiness in smiles exchanged between a couple married for fifty years. But for the most part it is enough to be where they are — they have all they need, they are comfortable, they belong to a society everyone else belongs to where their commonalities are shared apathy and mutually-nominal connection.

But if you never know what hunger is, do you know what it means to be satiated?

We are reminded of the Savage and his defiant claim of “the right to be unhappy” in a world that force-feeds meaningless, thoughtless, and costless pleasure. Without hunger there is no real fulfilment, just as happiness is nothing (and arguably worse than nothing) if its opposite is impossible to experience. All becomes a plateau of existence — you can have all you want whenever you want. It comes easy because you know not what you truly want nor are you prepared to pay the cost of waiting and earning it, and the pain of failing towards it. You only try for things already within your reach, with just enough willpower to say that you are trying but not so much so that you cannot say afterwards, “Oh, I would have gotten it if I tried harder” if you actually fail.

Compelling thirst does not count effort or time or attention poured into pursuit as sacrifice or as a cost — it is simply what it takes to get there and do the thing.

“So be it,” the hungry, thirsting person grins. “I shall struggle, I may suffer. And I shall be blessed.”