What the wanting does

A young woman in Banha wants to open a bridal shop one day. Not soon. She has no savings worth the name and no idea yet where the money would come from.

It may never happen. Most wishes like hers do not, for reasons that have nothing to do with how badly they are wanted.

But watch what the wish is already doing. She has started taking sewing lessons on Thursday evenings. She notices how every bride in the family chose her dress, and asks questions she would never have thought to ask before. She has become friends with the woman who does alterations two streets away. She turned down a holiday with her cousins last summer to keep the money aside. She walks past shop windows differently, and listens differently at weddings.

None of that waits for the shop. It is happening now, and it is shaping who she is becoming.

This is the part of wishing we rarely think about. We treat a wish as a destination, something we either reach or do not, and we judge it by whether it comes true. Yet long before any outcome, the wish has been at work on us, deciding what we pay attention to, who we spend our evenings with, and what we are prepared to give up.

Which means the choice of wish matters even if it never arrives. A wish for status will make a person watchful and quick to compare. A wish for a craft will make them patient and curious. Either way, they will spend years being shaped by it.

So it is worth asking, before settling on what to want, who that wanting will turn you into on the way.

Whether the shop opens is a question for later. What the wish is making of her is already under way.