Friday, 01 May 2009

• An End to "Suffering"

  One of the more annoying aspects of modern media is the tendency to editorialize everything.  An event isn't just an event--it is "shocking" or "upsetting" or "terrible."  I really like Brian Williams--the CBS anchor--but I am sick to death of hearing him apologize for the "awful" news about the economy,.  But I digress.

  One of the most egregious examples of this tendency is that everyone  who has a disease, it seems, "suffers" from it.  This is not only sloppy usage, but  presumptuous.  How the heck do they know how someone with a disease feels about it?  They imply that suffering is mandatory--it is not.  Pain may be mandatory--suffering is optional.

  For instance, I am afflicted with ME/CFIS.  (I know, "afflicted" has overtones of Tiny  Tim and his wee crutch, but the word is far more accurate than "suffers from").  It is a complicated affair, with a raft of symptoms--in brief, my moving parts don't always work, and often hurt.  Sometimes I wake up in the small hours with such pain I get out of bed and take some Aleve.  Other times, I will be out and about and a sudden spasm of pain will make me draw up short, grimace, and limp and gimp out to my car using my shopping cart as a walker--this is inconvenient.  But I refuse to "suffer" from it.  I endure it--not always with a lot of grace, admittedly, but I endure.

  I got  a crash course in the subject of pain vs suffering a few years ago.  I was on my way home from town, in a hurry to open up my stand (which involves taking folding tables  and heavy boxes of merchandise out of the back of my vehicle), and as I was getting into my car after my last shopping stop, I slammed the car door shut on my left index finger.  The pain was  so sudden and intense that tears sprang into my eyes, and I felt dizzy, disoriented and nauseated.  Pain?  Oh yeah--but I didn't suffer.  My thought ran thusly "Wow!  What a rush!  I have got to learn to be more careful!  Gee, I wonder if my fingernail will turn interesting colors and/or fall off."

  I could easily have chosen to suffer by thinking this way--"You fool!  You idiot!  How could you be so stupid?  God, I hope I didn't break the darn thing, I don't have health insurance.  God, it is so awful to be poor.  Oh no, what if I can't open my stand because of a broken finger!!  Boo hoo, poor me." Buit I didn't.

  Thing is, when we choose to suffer, we often do so by failing to live in the moment--by making rash assumptions of future pain or disability, or by labelling us or the situation.  When we experience pain, for any reason, we often focus on the idea of the pain--which makes it more intense--rather than simply focussing on the pain itself--which lessens it.

  Bottom line--we create our own reality.  One way we do this is by putting labels on what happens, and by failing to live in the moment.

  By living fully in the moment, and by accepting everything that happens to us, we can minimize pain and eliminate suffering completely.

  Pain is mandatory; suffering is optional.

  Currently The Perennial Philosophy (Perennial Classics) By Aldous Huxley see related

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