Esteemed Reader: May, 2004

by Jason Stern, March 18, 2009

“I fought against the bottle, but I had to do it drunk.” —Leonard Cohen, That Don’t Make It Junk

Esteemed Reader of Our Magazine:

Once I sat with a man whose legs had lost circulation and were becoming gangrenous. He was at once confronted with the immediate pain of his dying flesh and the present prospect of amputation. “I am in so much pain,” he said, his eyes clenched. His voice was expressed agony and was full of loneliness. He felt all alone in his suffering. Since he was my grandfather, whom I loved, I felt his pain keenly. I shared it. “Everyone is suffering, Grandpa,” I said. Some moments passed, his grimace relaxed a little, and he opened his tired blue-gray eyes. “You are right,” he said. “I know.”

In the depths of suffering—be it caused by rotting limbs or a jilting lover or the devastation of a bomb—one can find the realization that suffering is universal. It is not my suffering. Rather it is as though I am dipping my ladle into a seething, inexhaustible crock of pain that is shared by all. Everyone, everywhere—even every living thing—is suffering.

Avoiding suffering is the most automatic tendency of a living organism. It points out the signposts for survival. Suffering illuminates the necessities that bear invention. The intrinsic urge of life is to fight or flee suffering. Barring these possibilities there is adaptation.

For people the story is slightly different from that of plant and animal life-forms. Because of our friend and foe, Imagination, a lot of our suffering is based on illusion. We fear a stick that looks like a snake. We prepare desperate futures by resenting and clinging to painful pasts. Our capacity to remember and generate images produces a phantasmagoric prison of delusion—what might be called Hell.

But our minds can lead us to an equally present Heaven. Our mental capacity affords another approach to suffering. We can enter it, experience it, be in it but not of it. We can accept, transcend, and transmute suffering. We can let it tenderize and work on us and instead of making us tough and cruel. We can allow suffering to make our being more resilient.

The first step in the process of making suffering useful is acceptance. Things are the way they are. Everything is perfect and lawful. Rather than changing “things” to alleviate my suffering, I can take responsibility for my reaction to the objects, people, and events that aren’t arranged to my liking. Study the pain. Separate the emotional and physical signs. Find the root-tension of the suffering and allow it to relax. And then inspect the ideas associated with the suffering. We have no place imposing a personal agenda on situations that are infinitely larger than we can hope to perceive.