A while back I had gone to visit a famous home in rural Connecticut called The Glass House. The home tour highlighted not just the architectural elements of the building, but shard the life story of Philip Johnson, the architect who built and lived there. Johnson spent part of his week at the house in Connecticut and part of his week in an apartment he owned in NY City. He always joked to friends that after 3 days at the Glass House he was tired of the country and needed the city, but after 4 days in Manhattan he was tired of the city and craved the country.

At first brush, it seemed to me that Johnson had ‘gamed life’ he had the perfect solution to restlessness, to boredom, to the limitations of just one place. Badass victory! This is what I want too –for years Eric and I have scrimped, saved, slaved, all for the 2 house solution: A little city, a little country. A winter place and a summer place. Action for me and peace and quiet for Eric. With two homes, we could have it all…badass victors who had pwn’d this life, this world, worked out solutions to all the limitations…

But I thought about it more, considered the question: Beyond the glitz and the glitter, what is really going on here? And I arrived to the conclusion that what a 2 home life really says is that neither place is satisfying, that both places are lacking, that in either place Johnson and I both find restlessness and discontent. That having something doesn’t mean my craving stops, in fact I just end up craving something more, something different.

So what is the nature of these places and homes? Their nature isn’t to satisfy, even if temporarily I enjoy them, their nature is dissatisfying. Or maybe it’s just my nature to always be dissatisfied. Either way, a temporary enjoyment of something doesn’t make it satisfying, just like temporary enjoyment of eating doesn’t make it not a burden.

Currently, Eric and I are staying at a lake house, a country place we are considering purchasing as a second property away from a new city home we recently bought in Miami. Just like Johnson, neither place alone satisfies, so I imagine going back and forth to be a better option. And truth is, maybe it is (in some ways) a better option, maybe it is less dissatisfying than being in one place alone. Just like moving from one position to another is sometimes less painful than holding still. But in either case, the ‘solution’ proves the problem, the discomfort innate in this world. On the scale of dukkha I constantly slide on, I find comfort in those moments of less painful, less burdened, less boring, less stressful. And those moments motivate me to try and seek more moments of less dukkha, rather than motivating me to get out of a world where everything is always just more or less dukkha. It dawned on me, maybe I am laboring towards the wrong ‘solution’.

Intellectually, I understand this. Yet, a big part of me still wants the lake house. That part of me wants the future I imagine my life will be with it. It wants what I view as an ‘easy/known’ solution to the problem of needing a place to go in Miami summers, a quiet place for Eric, a country getaway.
The lake house ‘solution’ arose from a problem: We needed a home and we chose Miami…too hot in the summer, too hectic for year-round life. I still really don’t know what to do –buy the house and be done? Hold out for something better?

I worry about the fact that a lake house bought today cuts off future options… Afterall, just the other day when I went to much-despised-Manhattan, I considered how much I enjoy a walkable city, how nice it would be to live in one (versus in Miami or the country where you have to drive everywhere).

I also worry about not buying the lake house today, will it be a future regret of the missed opportunity to have it, it is so lovely and peaceful after all…just the other day some other potential buyers came to visit, I felt jealous, worried I might loose out. Suffering, not just in having and not having, but even in the imagination of having and not having. That is what these objects are to me – the fodder to fuel dukka.