• A burden is a burden, even when you pick it up without noticing its burdensomeness, or are reluctant to put it down: Recently my employee quit and I have been covering his administrative tasks, tasks that I hate, tasks I find stressful and burdensome. As I was dreading another day ‘at the office’, I considered the fact that this is just my duty, my responsibility, the obligations that come with my role. What else is a job after all, but a duty, an obligation? For years, I have focused on the benefits I enjoy from my job –enrichment, mental stimulation, a sense of belonging, a building block of my identity. Distracted by these benefits, I shut my eyes to what a duty/role really is — a responsibility, a commitment, a burden that I have assumed. But it is only a matter of time, a shift in circumstance, before the dukkha side of each role/object/relationship show themselves and by then, both worldly norms and my own imagination/ sense of self/sense of obligation make it difficult to put them down. I would like to quit my job, but I feel like I ‘owe’ my employer. I feel like I would be a bad employee, create bad karma by quitting now when they are so understaffed. Plus, I worry about who an  Alana without a title, a job, would be, where my value would come from, how hard it would be to find a new job that allowed me so much flexibility. Everything I take up in this world is a burden, a tether, an obligation –no matter the benefits I perceive myself to enjoy from it — and burdensomeness is just another word for dukkha.

• There is no such thing as a happy memory: After several months of lockdown I had noticed I was beginning to have intrusive memories of bygone times. I would be doing zoom pilates and have an image of my last pre-pandemic vacation in Japan. Walking around the block and recalling a time I ate with friends in a restaurant. Reading emails and recalling an amazing concert I had attended. These were all happy memories and one day I started considering them more closely. I evaluated dozens of happy memories–trips, meals, times with family and friends and I watched my heart as I recalled each one. I realized that when I recalled happy times, there was always a sensation of nostalgia that arose. And what is nostalgia but longing? Missing something that is already gone, that can’t be retrieved. The happier the memory, the more tinged it was with nostalgia. If happiness now is the cause of suffering later, isn’t it just delayed suffering? When we ingest poison, even if it tastes delicious going down, don’t we still call it ‘poison’ based on its harmful effects?  It seems to follow that even happy times are dukkha.

• Imagination is how you end up in bed with a vampire: At the start of one of my favorite shows, True Bloods,  the main character, Sukkie, has never had a boyfriend because she is psychic and can hear everyone’s thoughts, she knows exactly how sleezy all the men in town are and she has no interest in dating them. Then she meets Bill, whose thoughts she is unable to read because he is a vampire, and she quickly falls in love. It’s not that Bill is so great, it’s just that she can imagine him to be whatever she likes because she can’t read his thoughts. The reality of dating a vampire though is a life –or at least 8 seasons –of constant struggle, disappointment, death and danger. Imagination lulls Sukkie, it lulls all of us, into danger; we willingly march toward dukkha because imagination feeds the hope that we will get sukkha. But the real story of this world is a reality of dukkha while chasing the fantasy of sukkha. This world, like Vampire Bill, isn’t so great, but because we imagine it to be whatever we like, we just keep diving in –this imagination we love so much, identify with so closely, is our all-you-can-ride ticket on the dukkha rollercoaster that is this world.

• A body that facilitates pleasure is the source of all pain: After my mom’s accident I walked into the hospital to find her moaning in agony, a drip of opiates doing little to numb her pain. The problem with having a body is its a guarantee to pain: Sometimes its the little stuff: lungs aching from asthma, eye burning from allergies, the continual throb from a nagging shoulder injury. Or just the daily discomforts: Hunger, too cold/ hot, enduring unpleasant sounds and smells, even just sitting still too long makes me uncomfortable. But one way or another bodies are the root of all physical suffering, suffering that simply ebbs and wanes by degree. Which made me stop to consider why anyone would sign-up for a body in the first place… at least part of the answer is pleasure of course (the other part is our belief that rupa can help us build and prove our identities  –we long ago established you need a rupa suit to play in a rupa world).

• If not having is dukkha, and having is dukkha, where is sukkha? Eric and I are in Miami seeing family for 3 months and we are staying at a lovely Airbnb overlooking the ocean. Waking up to such beauty is so delightful and after a few days being here I already began to worry about going home, about losing the experience of such beauty. A few days after that, a super stressful quest to buy a condo in the same building had commenced (there were fights with Eric, a bidding war, a super shady realtor, etc.)Ultimately, I decided a home in Miami, particularly when we need to get back to CT when Eric’s office opens in April, is not worth the stress. It isn’t worth the burden of buying, or caring for it, or worrying about during hurricane season when we can’t even use it right now.

• Things that shift out of states I want are stressful, and everything shifts out of states I want: Yesterday I went to pick-up a special sweet treat to give to my brother for his birthday. The treat had both hot and cold components, so once I left the restaurant with the to go order, I felt like I was ‘on the clock’ to get over to Seth’s house. I was looking for shortcuts, trying to get ahead of traffic, speeding a bit –I didn’t want the treat to either get too cold or to melt. It dawned on me that this treat, that was supposed to bring enjoyment, was bringing me stress, and I got to thinking about why. The answer is that while perfectly warm and cold may be  the peak state for the desert, I know damn well that the desert can’t possibly stay in that peak state for very long. The reason for this is that the perfect balance of crispy fried bits and frozen custard are not the NATURE of the desert, it is just a single state. The actual nature of the dessert is an arrangement of 4es that continually shifts according to the causes and conditions of this world — custard exposed to Miami sun melts and fried bits exposed to ambient temperatures cool.

Of course, this phenomenon doesn’t end with sweet treats. Everything has a peak state, and nothing ever remains in that state, because the nature of this world, and everything in it, is flux. The problem is more than just the fact that I want ice cream, but have to accept that it melts because there are two sides (that was my old conclusion that life entails both sukkha and dukkha and they come together). The deeper problem is that the very NATURE of ice cream is meltability, but I falsely imagine its nature to be my preferred perfectly frozen state. Blindly I seek satisfaction in objects and circumstances because I don’t understand what they are, but the length of time they remain in states that I find satisfactory is brief (or at least it is never long enough), and even while they exist in that state I stress over the impending shift. No matter how delicious a perfectly peak desert may be, it is clearly stressful, because what shifts and fades and moves out of states I like is stressful and disappointing.  But the nature of everything in this world is to shift and fade and move out of states I like, therefore everything in this world is stressful and disappointing (aka dukkha).

• A no-win world is a dukkha world: I was listening to an NPR story about the obesity epidemic, about how even smaller amounts of excess weight, particularly around the midsection, are bad for our health and it dawned on me: Back in the day, food was often scarce, so humans evolved in order to store fat. Fat storage enabled humans to survive for hundreds of thousands of years. But today, in our society, food is abundant and the very mechanism –fat storage — that enabled us to survive for so long, is now a physiological feature that puts us at risk for death and disease. Again here, the problem is circumstances are always changing, there are so many angles and aspects to life’s complex processes, the very same thing that is a blessing in one circumstance is a liability in another. There are always two sides. My apartment in San Fran that brought me so much joy when I was traveling for work, was the source of extreme stress when I had to either keep paying the rent, or figure out how to organize a long distance move during the pandemic lockdown. My old Porsche made me feel awesome in Carmel, but super scared in Soma. With the basic truth of continual change, it is hard not to see that there is really no way to win in this world, because all you need to do is wait and a win will become a loss. Worse, the very quality/object/trait that helped you win will become what ensures your loss. Take it from a former Candy Crush Master, something may be fun for a while, keep you busy, makes you feel clever, but ultimately (in my case at about level 900), playing a game there is no way to win comes to feel like sheer torture. Isn’t an unwinnable world a world of dukkha?  My only problem is persisting in the delusion I can win.

• The things I love are like toggle bolts — They go in so smoothly, but it’s all sorts of hell when it is time to pull them out.  A friend did something that deeply hurt my feelings. As I was contemplating on the situation it dawned on me: This friend and I weren’t always close. We were as students, but we drifted apart as adults. It wasn’t until in my 30s, after I decided I wanted to BE a better friend to my old cohort, after I decided there was virtue to be had in the identity of being a good friend to this group, that I embarked on acting, and eventually feeling, the part. I used my friend, our relationship, to bolster my identity, but doing so was a double edged sword — as our relationship came to symbolize my virtue, his disapproval/rejection took on the power to deflate me. The pain I was feeling was something I did to myself, it was a consequence of the satisfaction I seek in the identities I  build.