I don't know what it's supposed to look like when a flat-screen monitor dies, but I think I saw it earlier today.

Coming home from work, I kicked on the computer while talking to a friend on the phone. The computer itself rattled and hummed as it usually does on start-up, but the monitor just took on an eerie green glow, flashed some weird lights, and then went black. No signal. Nothing.

I tried rebooting the computer, I turned the monitor on and off, but no improvement. It's dead, and not even a year old.

Welcome to Shokai's house of dysfunctional electronics.

If only I had a monitor I could rely on, I thought, but we all have these "If only. . . " thoughts often. "If only I had more money," or "If only I were more popular," or even as mundane as "If only I had a different flavor yogurt." There thoughts inevitably end, "then everything would be better."

Our minds always seem to want to have things different than the way they are. In fact, those moments when we are perfectly satisfied with everything - our selves, the world, our feelings - are usually so rare most of us could count those "perfect" moments on one hand.

But it's all in the way that we look at things. If we didn't crave what we don't have, leaning toward that which gives us pleasure and away from the unfamiliar and unpleasant, we might always be satisfied with the here and now.

So, you ask, am I satisfied with a dead monitor? Well, no. . . but you're reading this now, aren't you, so I must have figured out something. It turns out that I have an old monitor that I keep in the zazen room, a remnant from the day my old computer crashed, and it took me less than 5 minutes to replace the dead flat-screen with the old CRT. Is the old CRT as good as the flat-screen? Well, no, but only because my mind wants the image to look precisely the way I was used to seeing it, and my ego-pride wants to have the newest and coolest accessories on my desk top. But functionally, an old CRT is better than a dead flat-screen.

It's like this with a lot of things. As we look, we see that our discriminating mind is constantly picking and choosing, and while that's not necessarily wrong (it's the human condition), it's also the cause of our discontent and our suffering (also the human condition, see The First Noble Truth).

We had eight people for Monday night zazen tonight - a good turnout. But the pretty girl who came early also left early, and I had wanted her to stay. And others arrived late when they were supposed to be on time (according to me), and still others weren't sitting properly - all fidgets and poor posture. So instead of enjoying the presence of others to sit with, part of my mind wanted to "correct" everything - until I saw that I was just caught once again in "If only . . ." ("If only everyone arrived and left on time, if only they sat in the right posture without moving, then everything would be perfect"). And once I saw that, and was able to let go of it, then, in fact, everything was perfect, and now I can blog about it using my perfect old CRT.