What does suffering really mean? Is it decipherable, or is it an experiential concept?
When you say ‘I am suffering’, I think what immediately comes to mind is an absence, for example, to suffer from sickness and pain or financial or material lack. No one thinks of suffering, at least not at first, as double-edged, the substance it gives even as it takes.
As much as no one likes pain, sometimes even pain is necessary for happiness. With health, pain comes in the form of a healthy lifestyle choice, a certain form of restraint to enable a good disposition of your body. In certain scenarios, pain gives nothing back; there is no benefit whatsoever to what you experience. The lessons are not ones you needed pain to teach, but the pain is there anyway.
In some ways, we all live with a certain level of pain, ranging from mild discomfort to acute pain. Sometimes, the pain is temporary, appearing and disappearing quickly. For example, discomfort in the neck when you sleep wrong, or a random muscle pull. At other times, it may be more serious, like a broken femur; for women, pain is almost like second nature, with the monthly flow, waxing, and all the other headliners we put under beauty pain.
Pain could be physical or mental. With physical pain, it is easier to garner sympathy and understanding; it is with the mental pain that the severity of loneliness that comes with the pain is felt. When you are in pain, it is almost personal; even when two people are going through the same kind of physical pain, they may be experiencing it differently and, of course, find different coping mechanisms. It is also like when you are suffering from a broken heart; in some instances, even you become surprised at how much it hurts.
In some ways, pain is grief, a mourning, a yearning, and every other in between that signifies loss and struggle. The ironic thing is that while some pain is inevitable, we sometimes invite ourselves into pain. As in, we choose pain, whether deliberately or otherwise, by our acts or omissions.
The question, however, is whether suffering is really all that bad? We all make a conscious effort to avoid suffering, and I mean on all levels: we get rid of minor discomforts, we are quick to shoo away inconveniences like a plague, we would rather choose the easier path, even when it is not the best, just because it is readily available and familiar, than embrace uncertainties or difficulty. We may even brandish it as being efficient, but the underlying fact is that we refuse to suffer no matter what.
Why do we go to great lengths not to suffer when, invariably, suffering is woven into our very fabric as humans? I have no answer to this poser; maybe you will help with that and share your ponderings. As for me, my preoccupation is with the importance of weaving suffering deliberately into the fabric of your daily existence.
In fact, you are already familiar with this concept; it is in the word we use so voraciously, ‘discipline’. It is popular somehow in this fitness age. Training the glutes, ice baths and plunges. I am talking about expanding the frontiers and living deliberately, choosing to suffer daily. Suffer by doing one hard thing daily as a way to reset your expectations and propensity for pain.
If we leaned into pain more often, is it possible that we won’t chase happiness all that much? Is there something to a monastery existence, an ingue of denial and foregoing? To exist while doing without, consciously and deliberately.
If anything, this post is a reminder that we all push through pain no matter how mild or acute. The pain of going to work while it is so cold out, pushing to meet up with a deadline, pushing through social limitations to redefine existence, pushing through pain to birth a new life.
In the end, you can do hard things; never forget that when the world is closing in on you. Sometimes, the joy comes with embracing the pain.
Xoxo,
Dcconoisseur.
Connoisseur of Memories 