When Eric and I decided to move down to Miami to be closer to my family, he made me promise one thing – we would buy a vacation home, someplace cooler, for the summers. Miami summers can hit 100 degrees most days, they are admittedly brutal.

Just before we left Connecticut, Eric and I took a road trip up to Montreal. We both loved it and decided it was the perfect place to buy a vacation home. I started doing some research, planning out a longer stay for the following summer, looking into neighborhoods, home prices, and the legalities of Americans buying property in Canada.

That is when I learned that Canada was changing their laws: As of the end of the year, there was going to be a multi-year ban on foreigners buying property. If we wanted a condo in Montreal, we had to move fast. We extended our vacation by a few days; after 5 days in Montreal, we were in contract for a condo, set to close before the end of the year, when the ban on foreign property purchases went into effect.

The following spring, we went to check-out the home we had shot gun purchased back in December. For months I had been worried we had made a rash decision. Afterall, backed up against a deadline, we had bought a place in a foreign country we had only ever visited once, for less than a week…

After we had settled into the new place, we were walking around the neighborhood, feeling very pleased with ourselves. We in fact loved the new place, loved the city, our calendar was already booked up with tickets to all sorts of concerts and festivals.

I commented to Eric about how lucky we were that everything had worked out. Eric replied that it wasn’t just luck –we knew awesome when we saw it, we are good judges of places and people, all it took us was one visit and our Spidey-Senses KNEW. We were smart for seizing opportunity.

I wasn’t so sure that I agreed with Eric’s assessment of our cleverness, or astute read on cities…I thought about our move to New York – when we decided to move there, we saw what was good about the relocation, we imagined even more good in the city and in the move, it was the bad parts we ignored. As my miserable life in NY proved, this is a really big problem: Seeing only the good and ignoring the bad till you are living with it, in it, till its just a step outside your front door every single day. Sure, things in Montreal were working out now, but a 50-50 record hardly confirms my decision-making skills.

Fortunately, though, Montreal is a city that we do like, at least our few weeks here have been pleasant enough. Way better than my first few weeks in NYC. I told Eric, Montreal’s bad parts, its downsides like the need for me to study a new language, needing to travel a large distance between homes, needing to hire a house sitter when we are gone in the winter, are within our range of acceptable. Score, win, sukkah,. Right???

When we got home, I thought more about our conversation. I realized this whole thing, Montreal, a city and a condo I like, are in fact yet another proof in my collection of evidence that everything is Dukkha. Afterall, it shows that what I like, what I enjoy, its just something that –at this moment, under these circumstances, for now – has downsides that seem hedged, acceptable, manageable in relation to the upsides. Unlike NY, the life/house/experience in Montreal fit my mind’s box of acceptable, normal.

Everything really is dukkha if even the good parts are just parts where the upsides outweigh the downsides. Everything is really really dukkha if downsides feel completely and totally normal. If I have a threshold I default to accepting, only stressed when the downsides exceed that threshold. And even then, pleasure is so tenuous – I loved San Francisco so much, but a change in the city –more crime, more drugs – and I didn’t love it so much anymore.