Peaches and Pleasure

I settled down in Japan for turn out to be an extended period (5 years all together). This, after years of living a hand to mouth existence in the developing countries around the world. Hand to mouth living habits slowly waned as I began to enjoy the comforts of more wealthy surrounding.  For example, I began to treat myself to a weekly can of peaches. After some months this became a biweekly splurge. By years end I’d dropped all limitations. I’d buy a can of peaches anytime I desired. Whoopi!

This experience opened my eyes to the relative nature of pleasure. What initially was a truly pleasurable treat revolved into a take-it-for-granted routine. Not surprisingly, this drove me to seek out ‘a real’ treat. Basically, I had destroyed the initially divine luxury of peaches.

Lesson learned: There is such a fine balance between always allowing yourself to have desires and always ridding yourself of desires. The better I maintain that balance, the more pleasurable life actually turns out to be. In this case, sticking to one can of peaches a week would have been more satisfying overall. On the other hand, I would have missed out learning this important lesson. This corresponds to,  what is for me, a beautiful and essential fact of nature: If you would have a thing laid aside, you must first set it up.

How can we tell when we are going overboard? It is easy to tell when we lose balance in ‘allowing ourselves to have desire’: gluttony, obesity, addiction, gambling, meddling, lust in general (sex, drugs and rock and roll). Recognizing impending or current imbalance in  ’ridding yourself of desire’ can be more subtle. Strong emotion serves as my warning bell. Feeling compelled to abstain from allowing desire is a sure sign the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Tick tock, tick tock, back and forth, up and down: We are clearly not biologically set up to stay in the middle.