Recently, I had been re-watching the show The Wire. In it, there is a character Bubbles who is a drug addict. Bubbles suffers for his addiction, he lives in poverty, he is estranged from his family, he faces danger and violence, a part of him wants to quit, but over and over, the drugs draw him back in.

In the show, there is a scene where Bubbles and his friend are getting high. A smile of intense pleasure crosses his face as the drug needle slides into his arm. Sure, he experiences that as pleasure, but when you look at the whole context, it is so clear that it is nothing but dukkha. The malcontent of his life that led to wanting drugs in the first place, the daily craving to get them, the striving and scheming and scamming to afford them. The toll it takes on his body, on his life and relationships…even he wants out.

And still, that moment seems like such pleasure. It is moments like that that lead all of us to believe there is pleasure, but no matter how we feel, no matter how we perceive those moments, the case of Bubbles and the high make it so clear it’s just dukkha that we misunderstand to be delight.

It wasn’t terribly long ago that I had done my big write-up on Everything is Suffering. As I was watching this scene in The Wire, I realized that I had actually missed this really big point about suffering: The moments that I think of as delight are actually dukkha too; it’s just my delusional thinking –myopic blindness that comes from being too zoomed into a single moment, when the needle slides into my vein – that allow me to see what is actually dukkha as sukkah.

A little later, I had finished a particularly hard workout and noted that after doing something so difficult, I felt proud, accomplished. I felt delight. The truth is, I do hard shit all the time, extreme fitness, fasting, throwing big events for work. Neither the effort, nor the result is particularly delightful, and yet I take delight in completing these tasks. Like Bubbles, I hone-in on a particular moment and think sukkah instead of looking at the struggle so apparent in the bigger picture.

The truth is though that I train myself, I trick myself into this. This is a technique I use to convince myself to do what is hard in the first place. But why…

It dawned on me that I foster this delusion, that doing hard things, things that are actually dukkha, is sukka because I believe that doing hard shit is virtuous. So by doing hard things, I am virtuous. I use these acts to prove myself, to build identity, and as a result, I see them as worth it. I convince myself that doing these things is in some way delightful in order to convince myself to do these hard things. Never mind that doing hard shit to prove something about myself only proves my ignorance. It proves my myopic delusion.

Long ago at KPY I found a perfect bench, in the perfect balance of sun and shade, at the perfect time of the day to yield a perfect temperature. I sat there feeling delight. But it wasn’t long before the sun shifted in the sky and I found myself having to move the bench, or put on/take off a jacket. I considered that if I sat there long enough, it would grow too hot, no shade to be had at high noon and if I sat even longer it would grow too cold, no sun to warm me at night.

After having such a perfect moment, I found myself working/striving/chasing to extend that moment, and as soon as I got too hot or too cold, I was laboring, wiggling to get back to that perfect temperature state again. Now I had a problem to solve: I was subject to less than perfectly comfortable states as soon as circumstances shifted. I needed to figure out the effort, resources, patients, that would allow me to win back such a comfortable moment again. In that brief moment of perfection hope was born. Turns out, hope is a hell of a burden…

Thinking back on this little example now I see how it really catches this angle of everything being dukkha, even the things I find pleasure in and convince myself are sukkah. The comfortable moments in my life, they have consequences. In this case, me striving, working to achieve it again, acting as the seed of my struggles and efforts. In Bubble’s case, Striving, working to achieve each high again, no matter the costs, the fall-out that comes from being a drug addict. For both of us, these brief moments of comfort would have us endure even more hours of stress and pain. It’s a long and cold night I would need to wait on that bench before the sun came-up to warm me again.

Zoom-out and my moment of pleasure, its dukkha. Dukkha that I am in a body that is comfortable only in such a narrow temperature band. Dukkha that once I experience a taste of delight I must strive to keep it and ultimately find it again. Dukkha to lose the paltry moments of pleasure sitting out in the elements can bring. Dukkha needing to wait out even the possibility of getting that moment again. Only myopathy would have me mistake a warm sunny moment on the bench as delight. Only delusion would have me believe that what arises from dukkha, and leads to even more dukkha, could possibly be sukkah.