I wake up, notice the silence in my bedroom, and breathe a sigh of relief – thank god its Sunday.

For months, there has been a massive construction project going on across the street from my house. Everyday, I wake up to the sound of jackhammers, earth-movers and dynamite. Sunday is my one day of reprieve and, as I close my eyes again, to relish a few more minutes of quiet lazing, it dawns on me that this warm, comfortable feeling isn’t really good at all, its just less bad. My comfort is just relatively less suffering. Sukkha really is just dialing down dukka, for a little while…till Monday.

I have already established that my base state –hunger, desire, is a state that is dukkah. Then I relieve it, make it less, for a short time. That is just less of the pervasive state of hunger, turning down the dial. Soon enough, hunger will arise again. Why — because I am hungry by my nature, it is an inevitable aspect of desire. Hunger is both suffering in and of itself, and the motivation for further efforting and stress as I try to ‘solve’ the hunger, i.e. even more dukkha.

But here, in my quiet Sunday morning, is a further nuance to the reality of suffering: If good is just a temporary reprieve of bad, a little quiet in a noisy world, would I even feel good, or happy, or fulfilled, without the bad? If my apartment were not so unpleasant almost all the time, would Sunday be a relief?

In truth, I wouldn’t even appreciate or enjoy the quiet without the shitty foil of constant noise. So isn’t that all dukkah? If I literally need the suffering to have the un-suffering? If Un-suffering is born of suffering: Born in contrast to it, born of the effort to achieve that state? And any moment of relief exists hand-in hand with fear of loosing that relief. Struggle to hold onto it just a little longer. Knowledge that Monday always follows Sunday…