pleasure

As I’ve asked myself the question: “what place does pleasure have in my / our lives right now?” My most honest answer is: I don’t know. I want to be honest about this at the outset. I am not writing from outside or above the difficulties; I am writing from within the belly of the beast. My words are an invitation to reflect for yourself, to step into not knowing. I do believe that uncertainty can be a good place to begin. 
I want to say that pleasure is enough, that the right choice is to feel good whenever you can, and that we can close the gap between the world we are in and the world we desperately wish for simply by sticking to what feels good. That pleasure is a portal which brings us closer to justice, equity, and sustainability. 
In part, I do think these things are true. Some part of me knows them to be. But another part of me insists that pain is the price of caring. That giving a shit, about more-than-human creatures, about “strangers” on the other side of the world, about friends and loved ones, about myself, means being intimately connected to their suffering. 
So how do we balance these things? I don’t know. 
What feels important is that we try.

A meditative practice invites us to get intimate with the self, with our desires (attachments) and our aversions. Any transformation starts with awareness. My meditation practice highlighted what I was chasing, and what I was avoiding. From that awareness, actions to make changes ensued. And they weren’t small ones. I changed my job and the whole industry I worked in. I forewent being in a relationship with someone else to exploring a relationship (intentionally so) with myself. My circle of friends began to change. I changed my diet. I changed my relationship with alcohol and caffeine. My time on the cushion illuminated where I was attaching value to pleasure, and where that pursuit was still coming up short. Contrary to being on a path to contentment and fulfillment, my relentless pursuit of pleasure was in fact what was preventing me from finding it at all.