I was so stressed out trying to get to Pilates on time this morning: It felt like the red lights were conspiring against me, forcing me to stop at every block. Ensuring I would be late, would have to awkwardly disrupt the class when I arrived.

During class, I kept fidgeting with my mask, worried some pose, some deep breath might have dislodged it, left room for virus laden air to seep though.

After class, I was reading the news, more covid, worse surge, Omicron…I worried again about this new wave, about how I would stay safe and still get to see my family in Miami.

As I sat there, worrying, I realized that it was only 10 AM, but I had been in a state of low-level stress since I woke-up. It was unrelenting. I had been trying for weeks to prove all of life is dukka, but had I really considered the pervasiveness of this unrelenting, low grade, background stress? What was it? Where did it come from? How does it prove not just that everything is dukkha, but WHY everything is dukkha.

I see as long as I have desire, the stress comes right along with it. I desire to do Pilates, to be liked by the instructor, so I stress about being on time to class, about how that will effect my ability to practice, my likability to the instructor. I desire to have a healthy body, so I stress about catching Covid. Of course, I also desire a life, a chance to spend time with loved ones, so I stress about how to go on a trip to Miami while stressing about avoiding Covid. I have an agenda –a story I tell myself, a story I want to actualize, and so I desire all the elements of that story. All the elements I think I need to bring that story about.

All of life is a rat race. Trying to acquire what we desire, and protect what we desire to keep, while trying to be free of what we desire to be free of. Dukkah really is a direct result of craving; after all, if I don’t want, what do I care if shit goes this way or that, if shirt changes and shifts like the sands. Its my desire that things be one way or another –that I am on time and not late, that I am a good and attentive family member not bad, that I am healthy not sick, that provokes my caring, it provokes stress.

As long as there is craving, there is Dukkah — the two go hand-in-hand. And, for me, there is always desire. We are literally all born of desire, driven by desire, continue because of seeking to quench desire, desire undergirds everything we do or experience in this world. Therefore everything is Dukkha, because everything is tinged by desire.