You Can't Always Get What You Want... and that might be a good thing
Mick Jagger didn’t attend Camp Mishawaka, but if he did, he might have found the inspiration for his anthem to acceptance, You Can’t Always Get What You Want. We don’t set out to devise a program that denies children what they want, but by the nature of a camp community and activity interest, sometimes they just get what they need. If all the campers wanted to go waterskiing as their first choice, on any given afternoon, we couldn’t accommodate it. I am OK with that. What we definitely do is accommodate the requests at a future date. In the meantime, there are choices, some surely more appealing than others, but there are other opportunities to be had.
In our 2025 parent survey one parent commented, “They love all the options, and when they don’t get to try their first choice, they explore new things and learn to deal with disappointment.” Again, let me re-state: we do not set out to deprive children of their first choice, nor are we able to always accommodate everyone’s first choice of activities on any given day. And, as this parent wisely noted, there is some value in that .New discoveries, passions, and interests do lie behind the silver and bronze choices.
“Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known. ” ― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon USA
In a recent essay, novelist Rachel Kushner, reflecting on her own childhood of wanting, writes, “Who is to say that the longing wasn’t the most purposeful agent of [my] change? It’s the way I focused in an almost religious manner on idealized scenes that prove to me now that I really did have a childhood.” Most of the children I have met long to be an adult and shed the limitations that age, size, maturity and circumstances have placed on them. Kids often believe, as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes,” that being an adult is a solution to being a child.” Now, with all the trappings and responsibilities of adulthood, what I wouldn’t give to go back to being a child, even for a day two!. To dive for the ball that today rolls between my legs, as poet Peter Handke describes it.
I may be too far removed from it not to recall the acute pain this longing can bring an adolescent.” Do I have the right clothes?” “ If only I had a pair of those sneakers I’d fit in,” and so on.. These longings, amplified by social media as they are today, can visit real harm on a child who longs for acceptance or strives to accelerate their becoming. Real deprivation is something no child should ever have to encounter, but not always getting what one wants is part and parcel of being a child. Kushner writes, “Having everything we want would leave us nothing to desire, to hope for, to expect. We need both the reassuring delusion of what we imagine, and a reality that can’t deliver it. Life’s pleasures are, in part, pleasures we never partake in.
Mick Jagger may not have come to Camp, but Neil Young and James Taylor did. No, not that Neil or that James, but they most certainly didn’t always get what they wanted, either. I venture to guess that no one that has come to Camp Mishawaka ever did always get what they wanted, but for so many, they find what they need. And I am OK with that, too!
