Suffering

Life is suffering.

We can cushion our rooms till they’re soft as coffins, but we will still suffer.

We can swath our children, pad them, wrap them in bandages and casts as if they are already hurt and broken so that they won’t be hurt and break – but we will stifle and smother them, they will suffer.

I kept thinking the question was Whose suffering should I be attempting to stop or prevent? and How much suffering should I allow in my children’s lives? and Is there such a thing as ‘natural’/okay suffering and the type that is just too horrific to be considered the normal part of life and so should be prevented?

It came up in the discussion with other parents about public schools. I cried everyday after school in 7th grade. My parents didn’t do anything about it. I think I would intervene with my own. Then I think, Would I?

All of these questions of amounts and kinds, as if I’m a chemist in a laboratory, or a cook in a kitchen, with burners and measuring cups, and the power

The issue of power and control and choice, and people who say we suffer for a reason, or talk about the default deity who allows us to suffer so that we can realize things. The idea that we only learn through pain.

I don’t believe we only learn through pain. I think we learn all the time.

I don’t believe suffering is a means to an end. I don’t believe we’re being taught lessons – or that we should teach them, allow suffering, as an educational tool for others.

If suffering is natural, part of life, why would I try to prevent it happening (to my kid, to my fellow humans in Darfur)?

Yet however part of life it is, I don’t believe we let suffering happen when we can stop it.

I think I’ve been asking the wrong questions.

I’ve been coming at this from the direction of to suffer or not to suffer – from an either/or construction -

“…The opposite of happiness is not sadness, but a closed heart”- Elizabeth Lesser

There are not happy childhoods, free from pain and suffering and challenges and disruptions and unhappy childhoods full of them. There are happy people who have suffered tremendously hard things and unhappy people who have ‘had it easy.’

Happiness is not a function of not-suffering; it correlates to the ability to live openly, fully, heartily, to live with suffering in a graceful and truthful and real way. To spend energy avoiding pain, to mainline anesthesia, is to invite death into life, to mummify oneself while still breathing.

Life is suffering. To live is to suffer. To live fully, to live happily, is to invite pain to have its way with you.

My goal, then, with my children, is not to prevent their suffering, to plan circumventions around hard things, to control the hard edges, to pad the coffee table’s corners. My goal is to teach them – emulating, coaching, encouraging – how to live with eyes arms heart and minds open to the experiences, the sweet and the sour, the tender and the hard. To teach them how to suffer without losing their ability for joy.

I can’t commit the fallacy of considering myself as ‘above’ the plane where the play of the world takes place. I am not playing chess, moving the pieces around. I am an actor. And as such, I do my part to avoid committing harm or causing suffering – I use the rounded coffee table, for instance – where it is in my jurisdiction to so, that is, within the truth as I know it .

Life is suffering, but it is joy, too, and as a part of the whole, my role is to enact what pleasures and warmth and comfort and delight I can for my fellow beings – we find comfort in each other, in our shared experiences, in our stories. This is not the same thing as immuring oneself against pain, or protecting others from living, or interfering with the natural course of things. For we bring the greatest joy to others when we share with them, not try to fix them; when we act with compassion, not with purpose.

I don’t think ‘do no harm’ is the phrase I want to live by – I think of the Buddhist nuns with the filters on their faces to prevent breathing in and killing of dust mites when they sweep – no, that is not my aim. I want to be care-ful, but first I want to be live fully, with the pads off, so that every punch and caress hits me where it hurts, where it gives. To be vulnerable is to fully live.