The Grass Is Always Greener is a photograph by David Arment

the grass is always greener, the women always prettier, the man always smarter, the other side is always better. it has to be for a strong reason, that we always want the opposite side of the coin. so ill content with our fruits of today that we would throw it all away to achieve something else. to always want for what we do not have. an ironic insult to instil in our species. but why? what could this do for our species and for our persons? why are we never content with the place and things that we have?

from a young age, i remember our boy driving around on his big wheel we had gifted him on this third birthday. in the community playground, he was as happy as a child could be until he spotted another kid with a bigger or more colourful one. i remember the moment quite clearly, how his smile turned to a bit of a scorn, as the object he was on disappeared in a rage of jealousy. he biked over to me and attempted to explain his problem to a parent who was lost in his own imagined reality with one of the other mothers at the playground. both of us, perfectly fine in the world with our toys, both discontent with what we had and yearning for other realities.

it happened to the first buddha, when he stripped off his clothes and his labels from his royal parents family to wander into the hills and beg for food and sit in painful meditation. it happens with drugs and alcohol with the movie stars and business titans, and with the peasants yearning to make it in the city, and the citizens of the big cities wishing for the quietness of the oceans and the mountains. do the animals find this same yearning? does it help us as a species we are constantly yearning for the other mountains or is this simply part of the design of suffering that life is so full of?