A Few Thoughts About Suffering

You read a lot about people who suffer.  It’s an odd thing to read about when you, yourself, aren’t suffering, at least not in the way many unfortunate souls in the world suffer.  It is easy for me to sit back in my middle-class neighborhood, with my all-American nuclear family, working my white-collar job from home…it’s easy to sit back and spin fanciful yarns about how life is all about choices and our attitudes and learning to live with the consequences of our actions.  It is easy because I don’t have to explain misery and true human suffering to those who experience it first hand.

I haven’t really been tried, in that “life’s trials” sort of way.  I have had my share of issues to work through, but there is a whole wide world to help me put my trivial problems into perspective.  I am fortunate beyond measure, and for that I am so very grateful.  My children are asleep upstairs, cozy and comfy in their beds, carefree.  They have issues, too, you know; problems that consume them and are extremely important to their young lives.  But, overall, their lives are good…very, very good.

My children…all children really…have that uncanny way of slipping in life’s important lessons.  They mainly do so covertly and unintentionally.  Today, my children taught me that losing a bracelet you made yourself is an event that can bring a person to tears, to nearly inconsolable tears.  When found, the same bracelet can generate such joy and enthusiasm.  They taught me that not getting to cuddle with their mama at night is as horrible an ending to a day as one could not possibly dread more.  They taught me that mama coming home early because of the rain is reason to smile like an idiot from ear to ear and giggle with excitement.  Such are the lives of children.  Such are the lives of my children.

For me, there is a lesson in there about reacting to emotions.  There is a lesson about perspective.  There is a lesson about turning on and off this notion of suffering.  This last one intrigues me the most.  What is the threshold for suffering no longer being a choice?  When does suffering transcend the realm of childhood and enter the darker world of adulthood?  At what point do we become bona fide victims of the indignities and misfortunes that the world heaps upon us?  

I don’t know the answer.  All I know is that at some point, like most adults, I lost the ability to clearly see that line.  Maybe children see it more closely for a time but then lose it.  Again, I don’t know.  What I do know is that it would be magical to get that back.  It would be even more magical to help others see it, too.

I’d love to live in a world where misery and suffering are optional.