Present Still

You’ve just been promoted from manager to senior manager. Colleagues are gathering around to congratulate you, and you’re smiling.  But somewhere in the back of your mind, a quieter thought is already forming: now I need to work even harder to make it to director .  The joy is real, yet you barely get to sit with it before your mind is racing ahead again.  If this feels familiar, you’re not alone. We achieve something we’ve wanted for a long time, and within days — sometimes hours — that same restless emptiness creeps back in. We chase the next thing to fill it, and the cycle repeats. Buddhism sees this pattern through the idea of dukkha . It’s often translated as “suffering,” but that word misses something crucial.  Dukkha points to a deeper, more persistent kind of dissatisfaction that runs underneath our lives, even when things are going well. There’s a verse in the Dhammapada that says, “Health is the greatest gain, contentment is the greatest wealth.”  At...

There are moments when life feels heavy, not because something terrible has happened, but because we are quietly trying to become someone. It happens quietly, often without noticing, beneath the surface of our ordinary days—while standing in line, scrolling through messages, waiting for recognition, or hoping to be understood. In these quiet moments, something subtle is at work. Buddhism calls it bhava —existence, or more precisely, “becoming.” Understanding Bhava: The Buddhist Insight into Human Exhaustion Recently, while reading the Samyutta Nikaya , I came across a passage that made me stop and reflect for a long time: “Monks, a follower of the Path clearly understands existence (bhava) , clearly understands the origin of existence , clearly understands the cessation of existence , and clearly understands the way leading to the cessation of existence .”   At first, this felt like a distant, difficult teaching. But after sitting with it quietly, I realized this ancient wisdo...