Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh.
AAS as it appears in GURBANI seems to be different from the words desire or hope. May be it is more closer to hope. But not exactly so. It is hope, alongwith pain. And hope is not as we say, "I hope to see you". It is like "I live with the hope to see you".
And AAS is never ending hope. It will not die or have the end for a man or woman of spiritual attitude.
The following lines by Prof Puran Singh, seem to touch the meanings of AAS, as we see in GURBANI.
The pang of separation from the Guru becomes a lifelong pure sadness, noble, beautiful sorrow of human life in the very breath of the disciples.
O Love! I can no more praise Thee.
Thou hast wounded me too deep for song.
I’d rather be sad of Thee, in tears,
For thou art more beautiful than joy.
Wasting away in holy memory of Him is better religion than going to the temples and becoming redundantly glad by a meaningless ceremony. True worship is in the continuous pang for that Glory. Mere flower offering is a formality that kills the serious purpose fullness of love in empty theatricalities. All theatre and theatre-going, therefore, I say, leads us away from the genuine forms of true feeling. Feeling is always new, like the effects of the sky; its one moment is quite different from the next. Renunciation in that particular form as of Lord Buddha, is reality only there: in any other man’s case it ceases to be ‘feeling’, it is only ‘following’. Feeling alone is love, is art, is religion, ‘following’ is of no particular interest to the artistic seekers of That Noble Reality of a personal feeling.
The soul-pure figure of this pang spiritual which makes beauty a new glory everyday, is Rani Rajkor, the art-creation of a true disciple-character by Bhai Vir Singh, the great Sikh poet, in his The Prince Beautiful, written in Punjabi. She is the Sikh heroine. Her love is deep and silent and vital and painfully flourishes in the shade. In the glare it dies; much too Heavenly, much too musical to be announced so profanely. This relation of pangful love is between the Guru and the Sikh. All love has its sacred privacy and this too. In this love, art ceases and the artist grows to be the whole art.
ਸਤਿਗੁਰਬਚਨਕਮਾਵਣੇਸਚਾਏਹੁਵੀਚਾਰੁ॥