Losing is embedded in "Winning", careful

Having spent a good amount of time in a rural school in Thailand, one of my takeaways is that most learning feels like losing. And nobody likes to feel like losing. A change of perception can flip most learning into feeling like winning. But this is easier said than done.

What feels like winning? Goofing off feels like winning. Playing feels like winning. Eating all the salty food you can get feels like winning. Ice cream feels like winning. In short getting what you want and not putting in much effort is what feels like winning for the kids. 

But if I reflect on my own life, I am also a captive of wanting to win. Air conditioning feels like winning. Getting a good deal on food feels like winning. Being generous to a stranger feels like winning. Sexual experiences feel like winning even though they also feel like losing. Praise feels like winning. These are the things we want. These are the things I want. 

I think the big Buddhist insight is that winning isn't all it's cut out to be. Because embedded in winning is losing. There's a list of the three kinds of suffering and one of the kinds of suffering is when things we want and and change. Another form of suffering is the maintenance of the things that we want and like. If we like things to be clean, we need to constantly clean them. Or pay someone to do it. And even then it may not last as long as we would like. Aside, in Thailand there are a lot of little lizard shits and mosquitoes and it's very hard to avoid these in rural Thailand. In Bangkok the surefire way is to live very high up in a condo that is pretty sterile to mosquitoes and lizards. 

I think this is part of the idea of right view. When we get the winning we can enjoy it, but we want to see the losing embedded in it. We want to see the disappointment. We want to see the striving. We want to see the impatience. And we want to see how we contribute to those negative qualities. 

Sometimes when I talk about Buddhism I tell people the following: if there is a way for you to get everything that you want all the time go for it. If you can truly get that that is what everyone is looking for. Part of Buddhism is the maturity to realize that that doesn't exist. And that how are mind reacts when we don't get what we want, that is one of the biggest things that we can deal with. If we learn how to face it we can be ready for any situation. And if we don't learn how to face it we can be unprepared even when we're getting everything that we want, because when the part that we don't want appears then we can go into anger or sadness or frustration or impatience or problem solving mode. 

This is part of the beautiful Buddhist pattern that I treasure to have learned. Embedded in all craving is suffering. Maybe not a lot. And maybe also a lot. But it's there. And we want to learn to notice it, and become sensitive to it. 

The alternative is to seek all the craving and satisfaction and gratification that we can get, and then complain and be upset when the suffering comes. It's like getting excited when the ball goes up, but getting frustrated when the ball comes down. But every time we throw a ball up it will come down. If we start seeing this we're not bewildered when the ball eventually starts to come down. 

We also need to be careful not to have the message that winning is stupid. Or that pleasure is stupid. Pleasure is just a normal part of being in the human physical body. My teacher are Ajahn Geoff, has said that if you remove all pleasure from someone's life they will reject it. So people who talk about the Buddhist path is the path of suffering are teaching something that's very not Buddhist. Renunciation is a part of the Buddhist path. And there is something like suffering for parts of the Buddhist path. But there are other parts of the Buddhist path that are luminous and satisfying and fulfilling and nourishing. And that all feels like pleasure. And that wholesome pleasure is something to be embraced used and developed. Keeping in mind that eventually we might need to let go of some of those wholesome pleasures, or at least let go of our grasping for those pleasures. What we need to learn is not to be stupid about pleasure. We need to learn to use pleasure to help us develop to heal and to pause. When we do that pleasure becomes a helpful thing, helpful for the path, a stepping stone on the roadmap to our development. 

So we need to be very careful about the idea of winning. We cannot worship winning for its own sake.