Restlessness

Restlessness is the second to the last fetter before full awakening and is an essential driver of becoming. When restlessness dominates our mind, we reject what is and search for pleasant contacts and enticing activities. Unsettled, discontented, we want something else, almost anything will do, other than what is presently unfolding. We might prefer existence as a reader of an absorbing novel or a gardener planting roma tomatoes. When we resist restlessness, we engage in hand-to-hand combat with the mind’s tendency toward proliferation and the urge to be. Not doing something is doing something exceptionally challenging. Until we utterly extinguish the longing to do, to be, we remain mired in the inescapable suffering endemic to samsara.