Suffering
Suffering captures the human condition. Sometimes our quality of life constitutes a need to end the day, sleep, and cleanse our mind with bleak oblivion. Erase the pain. Douse the wounds. Die.
But what is this suffering? We work without complaint. We run through the pain to notch a tighter time on our list of accomplishments. Can this be called suffering? I doubt it. "All suffering is bearable when it is seen as part of a story," said Isak Dinesen, a notable Danish writer. More than that, I think such acts equal pain or wear, not suffering, since we work through it with a definite aim. They hurt, but they do not force us to suffer. We "suffer" by choice in these instances.
According to some therapists and meditators, we suffer when pain captures our thought and whisks away with an interior monologue beyond our control. As Nietzsche said,"what really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering."
In traditional European philosophy, suffering did something. Most classical thinkers thought it molded a man, rewarded one with virtue. The scholastics attached it with God's divine will, bringing the age old question to mind, "if God is all-powerful, why is there so much suffering in the world?" To answer this, philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Leibniz spoke for a cordon of philosophers, saying, "If there were no best among all possible worlds, God would not have created one." According to Leibniz, this was the best of all possible worlds, and logically, everything must turn out for the best in the end.
Voltaire lampooned this optimism with Candide, shattering the notion by showing the meaningless suffering in the world. Nietzsche staked the heart of the notion when he discovered Darwin, believing God could not survive the mechanistic view of evolution. "God is dead," cried the madman in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. "We have killed him." Without a God, reasoned Nietzsche, life had no inherent meaning. In this "advent of nihilism," we have one life. We must not waste it.
This makes Nietzsche's quote especially poignant when he describes the "senselessness of suffering." There is no reward of virtue. There is no divine plan. There is no best of all possible worlds.
Then where are we going? We suffer for no reason? Buddhism echoes this: everything is suffering, and the aim of life is to escape it. Our feeble grasp longs for a palpable release, or at least it seems when one surveys religion. Christians, Jews, and Muslims long for heaven. Buddhists and Hindus long for Nirvana. We long to end our restless loneliness, quell our anger, and heal our broken hearts.
Thomas Merton and others disagree(d) with Nitzsche, believing this longing, our ability to clutch at truths and our tendency to question meaning must reveal something more. The Buddha argued that one must learn to stop grasping.
The stupidity, suffering, and senselessness permeating life forces me to search. Watching my mother suffer, I need an answer. Watching the pestilence in Africa, I need a story. Feeling a frigid loneliness sometimes, a sense loss, a sense of hopelessness, I need something. I don't know what, but something is missing.
Is life a tragedy tinged with smiles? Or, as I often call it, a brittle masterpiece? Perhaps it's a single member of a species fulfilling a genetic imperative to overcome evolutionary pressures. That sounds bleak, but nothing seems to full dispel it.
I'm not sure, but unlike animals that desire survival, humans seem to desire to live. We desire to find a meaning, and for most of us, that meaning is love. A trite, old word, love pops up diverse sources--from lurid sitcoms to biblical commentaries--but Shakespeare does a nice job with the word (if one can bypass his language). I present Sonnet 66:
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
Love keeps him alive. Love makes life worth living. Love provides the sense to senselessness suffering. Could it be as simple as this?
Sorry to rant and so forth...
But what is this suffering? We work without complaint. We run through the pain to notch a tighter time on our list of accomplishments. Can this be called suffering? I doubt it. "All suffering is bearable when it is seen as part of a story," said Isak Dinesen, a notable Danish writer. More than that, I think such acts equal pain or wear, not suffering, since we work through it with a definite aim. They hurt, but they do not force us to suffer. We "suffer" by choice in these instances.
According to some therapists and meditators, we suffer when pain captures our thought and whisks away with an interior monologue beyond our control. As Nietzsche said,"what really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering."
In traditional European philosophy, suffering did something. Most classical thinkers thought it molded a man, rewarded one with virtue. The scholastics attached it with God's divine will, bringing the age old question to mind, "if God is all-powerful, why is there so much suffering in the world?" To answer this, philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Leibniz spoke for a cordon of philosophers, saying, "If there were no best among all possible worlds, God would not have created one." According to Leibniz, this was the best of all possible worlds, and logically, everything must turn out for the best in the end.
Voltaire lampooned this optimism with Candide, shattering the notion by showing the meaningless suffering in the world. Nietzsche staked the heart of the notion when he discovered Darwin, believing God could not survive the mechanistic view of evolution. "God is dead," cried the madman in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. "We have killed him." Without a God, reasoned Nietzsche, life had no inherent meaning. In this "advent of nihilism," we have one life. We must not waste it.
This makes Nietzsche's quote especially poignant when he describes the "senselessness of suffering." There is no reward of virtue. There is no divine plan. There is no best of all possible worlds.
Then where are we going? We suffer for no reason? Buddhism echoes this: everything is suffering, and the aim of life is to escape it. Our feeble grasp longs for a palpable release, or at least it seems when one surveys religion. Christians, Jews, and Muslims long for heaven. Buddhists and Hindus long for Nirvana. We long to end our restless loneliness, quell our anger, and heal our broken hearts.
Thomas Merton and others disagree(d) with Nitzsche, believing this longing, our ability to clutch at truths and our tendency to question meaning must reveal something more. The Buddha argued that one must learn to stop grasping.
The stupidity, suffering, and senselessness permeating life forces me to search. Watching my mother suffer, I need an answer. Watching the pestilence in Africa, I need a story. Feeling a frigid loneliness sometimes, a sense loss, a sense of hopelessness, I need something. I don't know what, but something is missing.
Is life a tragedy tinged with smiles? Or, as I often call it, a brittle masterpiece? Perhaps it's a single member of a species fulfilling a genetic imperative to overcome evolutionary pressures. That sounds bleak, but nothing seems to full dispel it.
I'm not sure, but unlike animals that desire survival, humans seem to desire to live. We desire to find a meaning, and for most of us, that meaning is love. A trite, old word, love pops up diverse sources--from lurid sitcoms to biblical commentaries--but Shakespeare does a nice job with the word (if one can bypass his language). I present Sonnet 66:
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
Love keeps him alive. Love makes life worth living. Love provides the sense to senselessness suffering. Could it be as simple as this?
Sorry to rant and so forth...