Mae Yo once told me to go look at the idea of preserving, to contemplate on refrigeration, because us humans are always trying to preserve. I’m no different, I’m always trying to either preserve a particular space/time/self, or– as my recent NY life has shown me– get back to the good stuff I failed to preserve. But thinking about the women and the wine glasses, the interdependent nature of suffering and comfort, was starting to make me suspect, I was bound for failure.

2014, the time of this contemplation, was a good, fat year. Mostly, Eric and I were comfortable –we were healthy, wealthy, in love with each other, happy with our friends and community; stress, aside for Eric’s chronic work stress, was low. I thought, this time/space (early 2014) is so good, I want it to stay this way for ever (it didn’t FYI). But, this 2014 time, when I really thought about it, was the culmination of struggles, it was constructed on the foundation of years of stress. There was our first year in SF when we were too poor to heat the house. There was the sorrow and stress of losing our life in Houston where we had moved from. There was the falling out with friends who were not as healthy and stable for us which motivated us to build new relationships.  All that made that 2014 moment in time comfortable was set-up by all the discomfort before it.

And…if I was being honest, its not like early 2014 was all butterflies and unicorns either. Even inside that comfortable moment, the wealth meant the stress of preserving it, of estate planning and financial advising. The stability at my work meant I was often board and unstimulated. And, underpinning all of it was the stress of Eric’s job, the job that allowed us to even afford to stay in the Bay Area.

The truth – there is suffering here and suffering there. Sometimes it is less and sometimes more, but the comfort and ease of less is literally defined by, built off of, the periods there is more. I don’t want to lose my relatively comfortable moment, I want to preserve, to keep the suffering at bay. The suffering I have now is fine, I can bear it, I want this moment static. But, I had said that too about Houston, and then I was even happier in SF. I’d said I was happy with $100 but then I got $1,000. There will always be new things in my life, new people, experiences, stuff, because static is impossible.  And with each new thing I like I have the work of preserving. And with each thing I like that I lose, the work of getting it back.

I shared this contemplation with Mae Yo and she shared a few thoughts that I will relay here:

She said that we try to preserve because once we have something, it becomes necessary. And just like suffering before is what shapes my happy now moments as happy, the happy moments cause my suffering later – each thing I love I will lose, each thing that is good will set the standards by which I view something else as bad. Understanding preserving is tied to understanding the relationship between suffering and comfort; since staying the same, preserving, is never really possible in a world that is always changing and moving, love of what we have sets us up to feel loss when it is gone.

She left me with a final thought about understanding how to practice, how to progress: “in your palm is sticky rice, just keep rolling it till the oil in your hand makes it fall off your palm.”

Its about then I saw the way forward with my homework of understanding the 2 sides of suffering and comfort. I knew I needed to ask 5 questions:

• Suffering in happy moments
• Suffering trying to get happy moments
• Suffering of losing happiness
• Suffering by trying to preserve, repeat and replace with better
• Happiness as defined by surrounding suffering.

Stay tuned for the long awaited homework assignment…