Where We Get Our Pleasures
Our seeking pleasures outside of us is one of the causes of our pain. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the pleasures of this world but living to obtain them means there is no end to working toward them. There is no end to the struggle to obtain, the desire, and the anxiety and fear that we will lose them once we have them. And when we do lose them, our lives all of a sudden seem like a pretty dreary place.
We might look for external pleasures simply because we mistakenly believe that is what we want. Even if it seems to us that we truly like what everyone else does, even if it seems as if we are being true to ourselves by wanting those pleasures, maybe our feeling of liking them is fed by the desire to feel that we belong. It’s awkward when you are having a conversation with people in your community or even just people in general and can’t relate to their wants, the things that excite or annoy them, the things that they do to occupy their time. So we adopt parts of their lives as our own. Our desire to be a part of a social group makes us have desires that were not even ours to begin with.
We are without a doubt a part of the world. If this world does not exist, we do not either. So it is natural that the world provides us with the raw material for us to create our pleasures. But how we create our pleasures from those materials is not based on what those materials are or how the rest of the world uses those materials, but how we experience them. How we choose to breathe in this moment, whether or not we choose to orient our mind in prayer rather than combativeness, how we perceive the slant of sunlight on the balcony in the late afternoon, how we meet people where they are, our hearts open to absorb all that they are but keeping our essence clear and present without shame.
A pleasure that truly lasts is not something that comes from obtaining something or arriving somewhere, but is one that wells up from the clarity of who we are and the way we engage with the life outside of us with that clarity as our foundation.