KNOW HOW TO BE SATISFIED
Desires are inexhaustible
I vow to put an end to them.
—The Bodhisattva Vows
One day in a Lutheran church in Texas, a miracle happened.
I had taken Georgia on a trip to see my mother, who was undergoing chemotherapy for her ovarian cancer. We had carefully timed our visit for one of the rare “good” weeks, which were only good in comparison to the other weeks of fever, nausea, and total incapacitation. At seven months old, my daughter would be baptized. The faith was not my own; it was not my husband’s. All things considered, that mattered not one whit. The baptism was a gift. But it was not the miracle.
During the middle of the service, I took my restless girl into the church nursery. There, bobbing in the middle of the room, was a contraption known to cognoscenti as a baby saucer. This was not the kind of thing that would ever land on my wish list. I thought they were hideous and huge, and I could not imagine giving up half of my living room to yet another baby thing, especially one combining all the crude amusements of a video arcade: garish colors, spinning balls, whizzers, and bells. Then the miracle happened: Georgia liked it. I thought to myself: Hallelujah! I want to make her happy.
Home again, I went straight to Sears and charged the sixty-dollar model. I impressed upon my husband the urgency of assembling it that night. He did; we rearranged the furniture.
She never willingly sat in it again. Oh, I’m sure there was a time or two. In a pinch, I would plop her there for the half second before her screaming began. I thought: Maybe I should get the ninety-nine-dollar one.
This was my first experience with the rule called Other People’s Toys. The emphasis is on the “other.” You like them precisely because they are not yours. The corollary to this rule is Other People’s Kids, precocious and polite, who make you think: Why can’t my kid be more like that?
We held on to the baby saucer for a while and then priced it to sell at a garage sale. I hope it delivered hours and hours of saucer happiness and satisfaction to generations of families thereafter. For me it was the beginning of an up-close analysis of human desire as expressed by Georgia. What I saw was that her desires were spontaneous, impermanent, and never ending. When she wanted something now it only meant that she wanted something now. Desires change. Satisfaction eludes. That’s what it means to be human, with infinite, insatiable desires. It’s not about the saucer! It did start me thinking: I want to have a separate playroom.
I tried to keep the big picture in mind when we went to Other People’s Houses and played with Other People’s Kids and Other People’s Toys. I’d see Georgia clutch something, somebody else’s something, with the fervor of new-car fever. I didn’t have to buy it. She didn’t have to own it. It would probably never come up again. Still, I thought: I wish she could learn to share.
This lesson took full form when she was slightly older and we’d leaped over that high-minded wall to watching children’s TV. The commercial kind. I would shudder as the hard sell washed over us in waves, gasping as my daughter pointed to every plastic, pink, and shiny thing, “I want that. I want that. I want that. I want that.” She was, in her plaintive and almost irresistible way, giving voice to innumerable human desires. It wasn’t about the Barbie Color Curls Styling Head! (Thank God, I thought. I want her to have classic old-fashioned wooden educational toys handmade from centuries-old patterns by artisans in remote Oregon workshops.)
In time the TV would go off. And so would she. On to newer news and other others. Her cravings could be extinguished by remote control. Not so, mine.
At this age, your child doesn’t have the kind of ruminating, obsessive mind that you have. Your child’s desires do not involve implicit judgments of what is good and what is bad. They are not based on biased evaluations of what he has and what he doesn’t, what he likes and what he hates. Your child’s desires are not yet masked by self-deceit and benign code words. Sure, the occasional tantrum and whining are hard to bear, but an unsatisfied child does not yet create the monstrous havoc of an unsatisfied parent. Parents of preschoolers say that one of their biggest problems is how to manage the tasteless, media-planted desires spewing from the mouths of their babes. It might be worthwhile, while the remote control is still firmly in your grasp, to shift some of your concern to the more subtle and insidious desires of your own—the desires that are far harder to turn off because you don’t even acknowledge that you have them.
Inexhaustible desires are the silent subtext to our whole lives, including life as a parent. I want, I want, I want. We spend nearly every minute wanting things to be a little bit different, a little bit better. Even now, reading this, you might be thinking defensively: But I only want what’s best.
We call it wanting the “best.” We say we want “advantages” for our children. We say we are “enriching” their environment and “exposing” them to more “opportunities.” That’s all well and good, but what do we mean when we say that? Do we mean that we want them to turn out smarter? More talented? More popular? More attractive? More admired? More successful? More accomplished? With more status and money? Yes! We mean all of that and more! To what end? To serve whom? To serve ourselves? So we can be satisfied? We won’t be satisfied then unless we know how to be satisfied now.
What do we mean by all these things we want “for our children”? All these things we think they “need”? Whatever they are, and however we acquire these things, the fact remains: desires are inexhaustible. Chasing them, however, will exhaust you. It will frustrate you. It will cause worry and anxiety, grumbling and dissatisfaction. It will disrupt your home and impose expectations on those around you. It will cost you money, and it will cost you time, all the while distracting you from your life, bountiful and precious, right in front of you. As it does that, it will cause sickness. Just listen to yourself wailing, “I want, I want, I want” (or just listen to me), and see if it doesn’t make you feel sick.
All of us have seen these kinds of mothers: anxious for their kids to catch on, catch up, move on, move up, be first in line, be next in line, be ahead of the curve, be better, have it all. All of us have seen these kinds of kids: bombarded with the best, assaulted with all the advantages, herded from one opportunity to the next, overdosed on exposure, starving on enrichment, and haunted by the endless dissatisfactions of their parents.
I have seen these kinds of mothers; I have seen that I am one.
And sometimes, only rarely, I see beyond my ravenous appetites to realize that all of my needs are already met. I have the opportunity to gently remind myself that desires are inexhaustible and vow once again to put an end to them. To fulfill that vow, I have the advantage of hearing Buddha’s teaching: Want little, and know how to be satisfied. And I should know how to be satisfied, because I have already been given the most precise and effective means to enrich my life: by not adding one thing to it! Not one more wish, not one more want, not one more thought. I can let desires, as they will, come up; and I can let them, as they will, go away, providing I don’t chase them all the way to Sears for the higher-priced model. I can trust that everything my family truly needs—every opportunity my daughter needs to fulfill herself—is already present and will be. Satisfaction is never the future outcome of some hoped-for event. Satisfaction always lies right where you are.
When I cannot evoke the even-mindedness to really know this, I can try to live as if I do. To that same end, I invite you to do some difficult things with your child. Turn the TV off. Throw the catalogs away. Even for the sake of literacy, don’t try to entertain your toddler by giving her toy catalogs and calling them magazines, as I once did. Take and use hand-me-downs; give even more yourself. Detour around the mall; it is not a free or safe playground no matter how bored the both of you are. Have garage sales, and size up the true value of your valuables. When your closets are full and your baby is too little to expect otherwise, write at the bottom of the birthday-party invitation, “no gifts.”
There is nothing wrong with a gift or a toy, but don’t append any extra value to any of them as needed or educational. It is the things we don’t have, after all, that are truly educational. They help us to see the chains of our dissatisfaction and, ultimately, encourage us to step free. What a priceless gift to the ones we love.