happy?

Buddhism focuses a lot on the connection between suffering and desire. Even if you break your leg, they say the suffering really comes from wanting your leg not to be broken, more than the physiological pain of it. The idea being that pain itself isn't suffering, until you want the pain to go away. The broken leg takes this to a more difficult conclusion, but it's easier to think about in terms of wanting our lives to be better.

Yesterday, I was initially set off by Facebook showing me a memory from a year ago, when my life was going quite differently. It feels like a lifetime ago, when I had hope and optimism, and what really hurts is the contrast. I got to feel alive for a brief moment, only to have it taken away. The feeling of loss, of wanting that back is what's really painful. Craving. Attachment.

I sometimes think about how open I am about my pain, and how others perceive that. There's a related dynamic at work, where someone who cheerfully has nothing will seem like a much better person than someone who's miserable about never having enough. The more we have and crave, the weaker we look. A person with no arms or legs who can be happy about it can seem far stronger than the able bodied complainer.

I could certainly try to post that way instead, but it's critical that this is genuine. So often we leap to this idea that we can simply will this contentment into existence if we set our minds to it. This encourages us to be happy with whatever we have, to appear to be strong and healthy minded, such that people fake it to varying degrees. Appearing to be happy is the appearance of success, whatever else we actually do have, but if it's not real, it's not healthy at all. 

How happy is everyone else, really? I often wish others would be as open about it as I am, but I have no idea. I know that for me, it's not so simple, and I have doubts that the underlying mechanics of it ever are. If we're miserable because we're starved for human contact, this may be part craving, but it is also the physiological effects of human contact being absent. 

When our basic needs aren't being met, it's naive to think peace of mind can be found by a radical acceptance of the situation, as resulting deficiencies erode brain function directly. If a person is starving, suffering doesn't only come from the craving for food, but the deterioration of the mind starvation itself causes. Suffering is also a mechanism that's evolved to help us find food. The idea that we can transcend the basic physiology of it is naive, but the less we understand that physiology, the more we can pretend our minds are unaffected by such things. This pretense only gets us so far.