Ah...Mr. Obama, can I um...have your email address?

It's Sunday, which means Meet the Press, This Week and Religion and Ethics Newsweekly in the morning and then 60 Minutes at night. I've always liked 60 Minutes, but I became hooked on the Sunday morning chat shows during the year long election marathon. This morning I woke up today with the excited thought: "I wonder if Barack Obama will be on any of the talk shows." This was followed by the odd realization that I actually miss Barack Obama. That's right, I miss Obama like a fourteen year old girl with a crush misses her cool civics teacher over summer break.


For an entire year I watched the man on television and saw him a few times in person. I read his second book and spent far too many hours glued to blogs and on-line news outlets sifting through all sorts of Obama related content. I miss the guy's cool, unearthly cadences, his sharp suits and the sense you get when you see him that finally,
someone with a brain and a soul is in charge of this place.

It's not that we haven't seen him in the last few weeks, we have. He's given half a dozen press conferences to introduce his staff, but somehow, it's not the same. I miss the soaring rhetoric and the chanting and the huge, huge smiles. I wonder if watching Obama govern is going to be a bit like seeing your dad siting behind a desk in his office on take your child to work day.

This reminds me of the Buddha's second noble truth, that the root of all suffering is craving, or thirst (Pl. tanhā). There are three types of tanhā: the thirst for what you desire, the thirst for being and the thirst for non-being. Each of these three will inevitably result in suffering.

Now, it's important not to leave all these Buddhist concepts at the level of abstraction, but to try to see them cropping up in your everyday circumstances. So I am in the habit of asking myself, in what way am I experiencing tanhā right now? Today, the answer would be: in the inexplicable longing to have another "meeting" with someone that I've never met. And does this feeling lead to suffering? Yes, to be honest. A very, low-grade, silly kind of suffering that is easily brushed aside, but suffering nonetheless.