The World Is Woven from Longing
Wei Pang
Prologue: Questions Everyone Has Asked
A newborn baby cannot speak and recognizes nothing. Yet the moment his mother leaves, he cries; the moment she picks him up, he grows quiet. No one taught him this. Why does he do it?
An adult sits at a lively dinner, surrounded by friends, and suddenly feels alone. Nothing is missing, yet something inside is empty. Where does that emptiness come from?
Millions of strangers will risk their lives for the same flag, and they will also hate one another simply because the other side is “not one of us.” What binds strangers together, and what turns neighbors into enemies?
And then there is the oldest question of all: why am I here? What is the meaning of my one life?
These questions seem to have nothing to do with each other: one is about a baby, one about loneliness, one about war and nations, one about life itself. This essay wants to show you that they are really the same question. The answer lies in something we experience every day but rarely think about seriously: emotion.
More precisely: longing.
The world is not built of bricks. It is woven from longing.
I. The Universe Is Not a Cold Machine: Overflow, Lack, Union
A Question Older Than the Big Bang
Science tells us the universe began in a tiny, extremely hot state, then expanded and cooled, giving rise to galaxies, stars, planets, and eventually to us. That is the story of how it happened.
But there is another question science usually does not ask: why did it happen at all? Why would a complete “One,” lacking nothing, not simply stay as it was, instead of becoming the countless many?
The ancients asked this. The Tao Te Ching says: “The Tao gives birth to One, One gives birth to Two, Two gives birth to Three, and Three gives birth to the ten thousand things.” An ancient Indian scripture says that in the beginning there was only a single Self; it was lonely, and so it longed for a second. The German philosopher Schelling wrote that the eternal One feels a longing to give birth to itself.
Independently of one another, they arrived at the same answer: longing.
Two Kinds of Wanting
But there is a problem here. When we normally say we “want” something, it is because we lack it: hungry, we want food; cold, we want clothing; lonely, we want company. If that original One lacked nothing, how could it want anything?
The answer is that there are really two kinds of wanting.
The first is wanting because something is missing. When you are hungry you eat, and once you have eaten you stop. Its satisfaction is simply “no longer hurting.”
The second is wanting because you are full. A person overflowing with joy cannot help singing. A craftsman who has made something fine cannot help showing it to others. A mother looking at her child cannot help wanting to give him the very best. This wanting does not come from missing anything; it comes from a heart so full that it must spill over. Its satisfaction is not “stopping,” but a joy that grows the more you give.
This is the key to the riddle: the universe’s original longing is the second kind. It is not hunger but overflow. Like a spring that does not flow because it lacks water, but because it holds so much that it naturally wells up.
The Spring, the Two Banks, the Joining of Streams
I use three words to describe the life of longing: Overflow, Lack, Union (in Chinese: 溢, 缺, 合).
Overflow is the spring welling up. The original One spills over because it is full. At that moment there is no “you” and no “me” yet, not even an “outside.” The “outside” is not a place that already exists, waiting to be flowed into; it is the space the world opens up at the very moment this surge wells forth. There is no particular object, only a pure tendency toward expression, toward appearing.
Lack is what happens once the water has flowed out and divided into two banks, two streams, two halves. Once separated, each half is incomplete, and so it begins to miss the other. Everything we normally call longing, missing, and loneliness comes from here. Lack is not the cause of the division; it is the result of it.
Union is the two streams flowing together again. But joining does not mean turning back into the original single drop. Both streams remain; they are simply connected now. Each finds its answer in the relationship.
And the river that forms after the joining keeps surging forward, branching again, joining again. This is how the world unfolds, layer by layer: from one to two, from two to four, from four to all things.
Every time you miss someone, it is an echo of that first overflowing of the universe.
II. Where Your Emotions Come From: Beginning with a Baby’s First Cry
The First Separation
Let us return to the baby from the beginning.
In his mother’s womb, he and his mother were one; he had no need to miss anyone. The moment of birth is the first “division” of his life. From that moment he becomes an incomplete half, and so he has his first “lack”: he cries, he searches, he wants that warm embrace.
His mother picks him up, feeds him, looks into his eyes. This is the first “union” of his life.
This division and this union look like small, everyday things, but they are the foundation of his entire emotional life.
Each Layer Grows on the One Before
Emotions grow layer by layer. Each union settles down and becomes the underlying color of the next layer.
First layer: the baby cries, and his mother holds him. What he learns is: when I call, someone answers.
Second layer: this experience of being answered settles into a feeling: the world is safe, or the world is dangerous.
Third layer: that underlying feeling settles further into the way he will love as an adult: whether he dares to trust, dares to draw close, dares to be seen.
Psychologists discovered this long ago. Children who receive steady care tend to trust others more easily as adults; children who are often neglected tend to become more anxious about, or more avoidant of, intimacy. That is why some people are consumed by worry the moment they fall in love, while others want to run the moment someone comes close. They are not doing it on purpose. They are repeating the earliest layer of union, or reacting to the fact that it never came.
The Good News: Foundations Can Be Rebuilt
You may be worried by now: if my childhood was not good enough, am I fixed this way for life?
No.
The layering of emotion never stops. Every sincere relationship you meet as an adult is a new layer of union: a friend who understands you, a steady partner, a good teacher, even a serious course of counseling. Psychologists have found that many people who lacked security as children can become secure as adults through relationships like these. They call it “earned security.”
Psychology calls it earned security. Seen at a deeper level, it reveals something important: union is never a fixed destination; it is a process that keeps coming into being. Every time you trust, every time you are truly seen, the universe completes a new joining in a stretch of the stream that had once been broken.
Your past decides where you start, not where you end up. Every time you are truly seen, a foundation is laid again.
III. When Millions Feel Together: War, Nation, Politics, Group
An individual’s emotions happen between “me” and “you.” But when millions of people direct their feelings at the same object (the same flag, the same enemy, the same dream), something changes.
This is not simple addition. It is like water freezing into ice: not more water, but water in a different state. Once the emotion of a crowd crystallizes, it has a force of its own, and it shapes every person caught up in it.
A Strange Experiment
In the early 1970s, the British psychologist Henri Tajfel ran an experiment. He showed a group of teenage boys paintings by two artists, Klee and Kandinsky, and then told them: some of you prefer Klee, some of you prefer Kandinsky, and we will now divide you into two groups accordingly.
In fact, the groups were assigned at random, and the boys knew almost nothing about painting. Next, each boy had to divide money among others. They did not know who the others were; they only knew which group each person belonged to.
The result was striking: the boys clearly favored members of their “own” group. Even more telling, they often preferred an outcome in which both groups got less, so long as their own group got more than the other.
A random label was enough. “Us” and “them” appeared out of nothing.
Us and Them
The experiment reveals a tendency deep in the human heart: we instinctively divide the world into “our kind” and “the other kind.”
Our kind feels safe, familiar, trustworthy;
The other kind feels strange, suspicious, possibly threatening.
In the language of this essay, this is a collective lack: a group often needs “not them” to confirm “who we are.”
War, Nation, Politics
With this key, many great events become clearer.
War has never been only about seizing land or resources. It can send millions to their deaths because it ignites two of the deepest things in the human heart at once: fear and loyalty. The same collective emotion shows one face as self-sacrifice and another as slaughter.
A nation is not only territory, government, and law. It is humanity’s largest container of belonging. “This is my home,” “these are my people,” “this is my history”: these feelings are what truly hold a nation together. The scholar Benedict Anderson called nations “imagined communities”: most fellow citizens will never meet in their lifetimes, yet they feel bound by blood.
Politics appears to be a contest over policy, but underneath it is often emotion: worry about change, hope for the future, a passion for fairness, a love of order. That is why political arguments at the dinner table rarely change anyone’s mind, whichever side they are on. Facts matter, but a position anchored first in emotion is hard to move with facts alone.
What This Means for Us
Once you see this, one thing becomes clear: reason alone is not enough to dissolve hatred.
Behind hatred there is often fear, and behind fear there is often lack: the fear of losing safety, losing dignity, losing one’s sense of who one is. Correcting someone’s opinions while ignoring the fear in their heart is like wiping away smoke while leaving the fire burning.
Look deeper still: how do tyranny and massacre happen? When a group, which was only ever one part of the whole, takes itself to be the entire whole and tries to erase every other part, the deepest evil appears. This is lack hardened into extreme clinging: it has forgotten that it is only one branch of the great river, and believes it is the whole river.
Much of human history is the story of countless hearts searching for union, only too often in the wrong direction.
IV. Why You Are Here: The Meaning of an Individual Life
You Are a Window Through Which the Universe Sees Itself
If the world began with an overflowing, then what are you?
You are a unique eddy that forms where that overflowing reaches a particular place. Through your eyes, the universe sees the sunset. Through your heart, it feels what it is to miss someone. Through your arms, it embraces another person.
There are more than eight billion people in the world, but there is no second you. The sunset you see is not the one anyone else sees; the particular way you miss someone is not how anyone else feels it. Through you, the universe experiences what it can experience through no one else.
So your uniqueness is itself your meaning.
Meaning Is Not Found, It Is Lived
Many people spend their whole lives “searching for meaning,” as if it were buried somewhere, waiting to be dug up.
Look at it another way: you are not searching for meaning; you are expressing it. A spring does not need to “search” for the meaning of flowing; flowing is its meaning. How you love, how you suffer, how you do your work, how you treat the people around you: that is the meaning itself.
The Cracks Are Part of You, Too
A life passes through many divisions: parting, loss, betrayal, abandonment, broken dreams.
We often see these as stains on our lives and wish we could erase them. But if the world itself unfolds through division and union, then these divisions are not mistakes. They are threads this tapestry cannot do without.
Every division is waiting for its union.
A loss may, years later, become your ability to understand the pain of others;
A betrayal may teach you to tell what true love is;
A breaking may let you see, for the first time, what you truly want.
Union does not always come quickly, and it may not come in the form you expect. But once you have found the place a wound holds in your life, that crack is no longer just an injury. It has become part of you.
Wholeness does not mean having no cracks. It means finding a place for every one.
V. A Few Reminders for Everyday Life
With the ideas laid out, in daily life they come down to a few simple points.
1. Ask whether your wanting comes from lack or from fullness
The next time you badly want something, ask yourself: do I want this because I feel empty inside? Or because I feel full, and want to give something away?
Scrolling your phone late at night and being unable to stop, buying one thing after another you don’t really need, constantly checking how much someone cares about you in a relationship: these are often lack. Cooking a meal for your family, teaching a child a skill, doing your work well: these are often overflow.
Both are normal; both are human. But a life run only on lack grows more and more exhausting, while a heart with overflow in it grows wider and wider.
2. Lack is not bad; it is pointing the way
Loneliness, missing someone, not being able to let go: these all hurt. But they are not malfunctions. They are a compass: what you lack often shows you what you need to be connected to.
The real problem is not lack but lack that has frozen: always grasping, possessing, controlling, and forgetting that lack was meant to lead toward union. The tighter you grip, the farther union moves away.
3. See the fear behind anger
When someone flares up at you, when one group hates another, there is often fear behind it: fear of loss, fear of being looked down on, fear of not being safe.
This is as true of others as it is of yourself. The next time you are overcome by rage, try asking: what am I afraid of? Once you see the fear, the anger often loosens by half.
4. Giving lasts longer than getting
Satisfaction that comes from getting arrives fast and leaves fast. Once you have it, it fades, and then you want the next thing. But the satisfaction found in giving (companionship, creation, helping, love) is not used up by being given; it grows the more you give.
More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle noticed this. Some activities end once they are complete, like building a house. Others are already whole at every moment, like seeing, thinking, and living well. The deepest human happiness belongs to the second kind.
Desire born of lack returns to zero once it is satisfied, like scratching an itch: once the itch is gone, nothing remains. Longing born of overflow does not run dry as it expresses and gives itself; it is more like playing music, where every note that falls makes the whole piece richer. The deepest happiness is not the absence of pain, but life growing fuller as it flows.
5. Your wounds will find their place
If you are in the middle of some division right now (a loss, a breaking), remember that division is not the end of the story. Give it time, and give yourself patience. Seek out people who can truly see you: friends, family, or professional help. Every time you are truly seen, a union begins.
Epilogue
Let us return to the questions we began with.
Why does a baby cry the moment his mother leaves? Because he has just gone through the first division of his life, and he is searching for union.
Why can we feel alone at a lively dinner? Because having people around is not the same as being seen. Union is not about numbers; it is about a true response.
Why will strangers risk their lives for the same flag, and why do they come to hate one another? Because countless hearts are searching together for belonging, and when “us” can be defined only by “them,” belonging turns into hostility.
Why am I here? Because the universe, in its overflowing, needs a vantage point only you can provide, in order to see itself and love itself.
The answers to all these questions point to the same source: the underlying color of the world is not a cold machine but an overflowing longing. It flows out and divides into you and me, so that we miss one another; and in every sincere meeting, it joins together again.
None of your love or pain is random noise. It is the universe’s deepest longing, finding its way home through you.