What if Suffering is More of an Honest Thing than a Bad Thing?
You keep using that word. Maybe it doesn’t mean what you think it means.
In our fear-based society, probably the thing we fear the most is suffering.
Realistically, more often than not, the fear of suffering is far worse than any suffering is or will be.
Allow me to prove this to you. Have you ever had a boss or a loved one say, “We need to talk,” with no context? Did you then start to become concerned about what the nature of the conversation might be, if you were about to get bad news or told something awful? Then, did you start to build it up to be this horrible thing in your head that you were certain would be the cause of tremendous pain, discomfort, and suffering?
If it was not a bad thing, then all that fear of suffering was for naught. But if it was a bad thing – more likely than not, it wasn’t nearly as unpleasant, painful, or the cause of the amount of suffering you feared it would be.
We build up suffering to be the worst. It doesn’t matter if suffering will be literal or figurative, physical or mental/emotional/spiritual, or some bizarre combination therein. People go to great lengths to avoid the possibility of suffering – sometimes even against better judgment, logic, reason, or what-have-you. Ironically, that often leads to more suffering or more fear of suffering.
But what if we take another look at suffering and cast it into a very different – and far less horrific – light?
Lost in translation
The first of the Buddhist Four Noble Truths is that life (existence) is dukkha – a word in Sanskrit or Pali that is usually translated to “suffering”. Hence, the notion that “Life is Suffering” is a huge part of Buddhist philosophy. But the idea by no means belongs to Buddhism alone. Most monotheist religions also relate things to suffering as a huge part of our Earthly-bound lives in one way or another.
But what if “suffering” isn’t what was meant? At least, not in the sense of unease and pain. What if, instead, it mostly just means difficulty?
Recently, I had a new idea on this notion. What if the word “suffering” is kind of a misnomer? Maybe a better interpretation of the Buddhist concept might be that life is experiencing.
Let’s face it – life is difficult. Sure, from time to time, it’s easy. But more often than not – it’s difficult. There are challenges to be overcome, obstacles, new ideas to be learned, people to meet, and all sorts of factors that ramp up various and sundry difficulties.
Of course, sometimes this causes suffering. But that’s almost always wholly dependent on how you choose to frame it. Given the imperfect translation of the word “dukkha”, perceiving suffering and all the bad that could go with it might also – arguably – be a mistranslation.
Good, bad, amazing, awful, joyful, sorrowful — you’re experiencing it all. And so long as you draw breath and are alive, you ARE a human, being. What if life isn’t suffering but just experiencing difficulties?
This is not downplaying suffering
I’d like to make it clear that I’m not saying suffering is nonexistent. Because it does happen. People are oppressed, abused, disenfranchised, treated like garbage, and on all sorts of general and specific levels experience suffering.
Trauma happens. Injuries occur. Suffering we experience resulting from these is real and legit. Horrible, awful things that caused you to suffer are not what I’m exploring here.
What I’m on about is the massively generalized, sometimes weaponized notions of suffering. Especially the fear of suffering that’s the basis of much of our fear-based society.
You always have a choice for your approach to life. You can choose to see it as suffering, pain, and awfulness to be avoided. Or you can see it instead as an experience with difficulties that challenge you to grow, learn, and gain new insights.
It doesn’t always feel like this is the truth. But it is. If you’re reading this, I’d say it probably applies to you.
This is not disregarding suffering you’ve experienced or might be experiencing. I’m also not suggesting this idea can alleviate, remove, or disregard that shit happens, and you will experience bad from time to time. Welcome to the human condition.
This is about exploring choice.
There’s always a choice
Sometimes your choices suck. There are definitely times when it feels like any choices that you can make are barely worth bothering with. Truly, sometimes the only choices available to you are entirely intangible and/or between bad or worse.
So long as you live, and are a human, being – you have choices.
One of the biggest but most overlooked is approach. You get to choose every day if your approach to life is one of negativity or positivity.
This is not that cut and dried. Sometimes there is positivity in the seemingly negative and negativity in the seemingly positive. What’s more, the positive today can be the negative tomorrow – and vice versa.
Still, you get to choose – you always get to choose – if you approach life as being full of potential, possibility, and some difficulty and challenges to be overcome.
– Or –
You can approach life as being lacking in potential due to fatalism, impossibilities, and suffering you can only dodge or do things to lessen.
You might flip-flop between these from time to time due to circumstances, random chance, happenstance, and other matters you have no control over. But you always get to choose.
The fear of suffering is a choice. When you look at it more closely, it can appear terrifying. But look closer still, and it might appear instead not to be so scary – just unknown.
If we didn’t explore the unknown – how limited would we be? This is true for you, me, and everyone.
The fear of suffering can be the fear of the unknown. Maybe it will suck. But maybe instead it will rock. How you choose to approach it is wholly your decision to make. And it’s very seldom a one-and-done decision.
Thus, how you view suffering is a choice.
Altering your approach toward suffering isn’t hard
It’s all about working with mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct your actions.
When you recognize that most suffering is not about the suffering as much as it is the fear of suffering – you open yourself to recognizing and choosing how to handle it. Knowing that you can reframe suffering from a probably negative to a maybe positive, you can more easily choose and decide what to do in the face of it.
This empowers you – and in turn, your empowerment can empower others around you.
Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts life in a way that opens more dialogue. With a broader dialogue, you can explore and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.
Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs an approach and attitude of positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.
The better aware you are of yourself in the now, the more you can do to choose and decide how your life experiences will be. When that empowers you, it can spread to those around you to their empowerment.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the five-hundred and second (502) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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