Lack

2025.08.13.

I love sweets, especially krémes (custard slice), in all its versions. I love the soft cream between the crumbly pastry layers, the intense hit of sugar, and I even enjoy the struggle of those first bites — when the fork desperately tries to pierce the top layer without squashing the pale yellow-white soul of the dessert across the plate, an almost impossible task.

You can’t eat it gracefully. You don’t even need a fork. It’s much better to grab it with your hands, open your mouth wide, and bite into it, just like we did as kids, when maybe our parents laughed out loud watching the passionate joy with which we devoured those giant cubes...

Today I missed it badly. I craved a krémes.

My whole day was filled with lack — a sense of “not having” that ran through my morning as I moved from one place to another. I felt empty, and I didn’t know what could fill that void. So I wanted to fill myself — and with what else, if not a krémes?

The last time this gnawing feeling struck me was a few weeks ago at a silent retreat. We got an assignment: write down what we long for. I longed for a krémes. One from the abbey’s pastry shop. We were given nearly 40 minutes for the task, and from the very first moment all I could think about was that dessert. I tried to recall how it had been a year earlier when I was last there. Its size, its color, its taste.

I remembered bringing a whole tray for the group back then, as dessert after our closing dinner. Sitting there in silence, I began to draw it for myself. I tried to bring it closer, to imagine where I would bite into it, and how amazing it would feel when the crisp layers cracked, releasing the cream to its final journey, starting a slow, embracing dance with my taste buds — back and forth, back and forth — until the fleeting moment ended in a wild orgy of flavors that let itself out as a satisfied sigh...

That’s what I longed for today too. For that fleeting moment that can burn so deeply into my life... But there was no krémes.

Lack gives birth to desire, and then feeds it. Desire that can add so much to our lives. And it all begins with not having. Desire pulls us forward, the emptier the void, the stronger it sucks us in.

Desire gives focus. It fills us with passion.

But today, we don’t know how to wait. We want everything, right here, right now, the moment the thought arises. But why?

Maybe because in today’s society, lack — not having — has become shame. If you don’t have a job, a family, children, a career, success, expensive things — that absence is often labeled as failure by our environment, our parents, our relatives, our friends. And even if you do have them, one is not enough. Better to have two. Or many!

Why not bigger, flashier, louder?

Today, lack is rarely motivation. It’s more often a stigma. The scarlet letter of “you’re not good enough.” We adopt this logic, and from then on desire is no longer the quiet motor of growth but its oppressive compulsion. It’s not passion, but fear that flavors the celebratory cake of “not having.”

Today, lack is no longer soothing emptiness, no longer silence, only a label. A symbol of weakness, helplessness, and vulnerability.

Yet not having is an incredibly honest mirror.

We are filled with things, with “somehow” friends, and in the madness of possession, in the soft embrace of having, we don’t even notice how all this stuff robs us of living space. We don’t dare clear people or things out of our lives, because what if nothing remains?

But do we really need what we have?

How could we know, how could we be sure, until we feel the lack of it?

When something disappears from our lives, its absence shows how deeply it belonged to us. What matters isn’t what we own, but what that ownership meant to us. This is the power of lack: it brings order, creates space, and points to the place in us that we want to fill. Not with everything. Only with what we truly, truly miss.

So tomorrow, I’ll buy myself a krémes.