In  the fall of 2020, with Covid still raging, and Eric and I still ‘sheltering in place’, we decided it was time to rent a country home — at least if we were going to be isolated, we could do it with plenty of space to spread out in.

We found a nice sized home in Northern CT and signed a lease. Suddenly, all of my thoughts were consumed with the stresses of moving (in a pandemic no less); stress over hiring a  moving company, stress over decorating, stress over buying new furniture online since we still weren’t visiting stores, stress over if we got a good deal on the place, stress over maintenance…in the midst of a near panic attack,  I realized just how much I suffer for my stuff, just how much stress I endure in the hopes of creating, and then abiding in, an environment I like. I seek pleasure/satisfaction in rupa, but I endure mental and physical anguish trying to arrange/force rupa into a state I find pleasurable. 

A few weeks ago, the earliest reds and yellows and oranges of fall had begun to brighten the leaves of some of the trees outside my window. I was so excited, especially in the long and boring Covid year, for the season’s change; impatiently I cursed the slow to change green trees, the ‘boring evergreens’, that were holding-up fall’s full glory. Now though, fall was past peak and the trees were mostly bare and brown.  As I looked out, I was so thankful for those evergreens, that I had cursed just a few weeks ago, because they were the only splash of color in an otherwise bleak view.

Looking out the window, trying to calm my moving qualms, I reflected further on the trees, and I realized my deep misunderstanding of rupa: Rupa forms –homes, trees — really don’t bow to me, they do not exist to give me satisfaction or to create an environment  I like. Anything that takes a form I like, such as a perfectly fall colored tree, does so only because its nature allows it to do so, because the causes and conditions for that state have been met, not because I desire/hope for/control it/force it. And it will eventually change to a different form according to its nature. All while my own preferences are shifting as well, pushing the hope of satisfaction in these objects even further out of reach.

I stress over renting and arranging a house because I imagine that eventually it will bring me satisfaction, that it will be the perfectly curated environment I desire. The problem is that rupa does not exist to satisfy my desires. Those occasions in which I am pleased with a particular state of form, a particular color of leaf, are just sometimeses, I don’t have a full picture of how they will change in the future. I try to use sometimes states to bring me satisfaction, but the truth is that they bring me stress –the stress of trying to bring them about, the stress of trying to keep them, and the stress over their loss. Stress that never really buys satisfaction because what is temporary and changeable only ever leads to thirst.