Demarcate: Unsatisfactoryness

I woke up this morning, put my breakfast on to bake in the toaster oven, and then thought about what to do while I was waiting. I found that I just wanted to sit and enjoy sitting. When I sat and there was a feeling of energy, of slight agitation and relief. Then I concluded that part of the pleasure of sitting was the relief of being at rest after having been so active and now being able to sit down. But in no time my thoughts got going and then turned towards writing this down.

When I consider many of the things I was taught that I took to be the way things are, I see flaws in every one. So, for example, when I took shop in high school, I was told: “the function dictates the form.” In other words, when you design a product, you should first consider the function to which it is to be put, and based on that decide the form it should take. Nowadays, however, it seems to me that a lot of products are sold based on glitzy, shining, colourful design and packaging, aggressive pricing and various marketing techniques, from the in-your-face to the more subtle. But, even if one tries to follow the function first, it depends on who’s designing it and who’s using it, and so often we see products designed by engineers in accordance with what they find functional vs. what the average non-technical person finds easy to use and helpful.

Where I’m going with this is that in every bit of conventional wisdom that I come across, or even the non-conventional variety, I find unsatisfactoryness is sure to follow, as I always discover a glitch. And, of course, I believe that was one of the Buddha’s points. So, here I’ve been thinking there was something wrong all the time, only to encounter a view that says that my discovery is unoriginal business as usual. I’ve gotten hung up on this little bit of unsatisfactoryness so often and suffered from it so much, and I just can’t seem to stop doing it. Finding out what’s “wrong,” about any given hypothesis or theory has become a habit, but as for where to go from there, I still haven’t quite got that part.

Perhaps that’s where the compassion comes in, that we are all in the same boat, even though a lot of us don’t know it. But from here, I can see how not clinging can reduce the suffering. If we hold to ideas we find a lot of suffering. If we hold on to stuff, whether it be hardware or software, so-called durable and non-durable goods, we suffer. If we don’t, we don’t. If we hold onto our suffering we suffer from that too. And given our propensity for both, there’s plenty of room for compassion in this equation!