The Banality of Suffering
As I return from vacation, I emerge from the constant low-grade buzz that is issued with the pool towels and drink vouchers at every Caribbean resort. Eight days in Puerto Rico completely obliterated every care in the world, literally in the entire world, that crashed back on me as we packed for the return, checked the email and news feeds, touched down and hailed to the curb a cab to take us home.
We missed conflict at work, family disappointments, political squabbles, several mass shootings, fights over mask mandates, desperate homeless people committing violent acts in our neighborhood, and massive armies mobilizing to fight the biggest battle most people alive on this planet have ever seen in Donbas.
We missed suffering.
Oh, it was always there, rumbling underneath our leisure. Empathy is a powerful force, and while we lost contact with the anonymous suffering of all people we came closer together as a family, truly connecting, exposing in intimate conversations the little scars life has cut us with during the last couple of years. We made new friends, joined together by the relief that we were out again, together again, after so long spent in some mandated isolation that led to a dangerous focus on our internal failings over the needs and demands of community.
We returned free to feel for others again, and free to admit our weakness against the suffering of the world.
We were away during Easter, a holy time noted for the sacrifice of one man to a cruel death accepted to relieve us all of suffering and the guilty feeling of our incapacity to salve the wounds of others. But while that act of sacrifice leaves us forgiven and brightens our lives with the possibility of salvation, we still suffer.
People are resilient. They always find ways to deal with the most difficult challenges of life. A man I work with has family in Ukraine, living in an area little affected by the war. He speaks with these people every day, and while their lives are focused on helping those fleeing devastation, on nice days the cafes are still filled and the streets are crowded with people going about their lives. For these lives, these little lives, are all we have. We must live these little lives. These little lives and the fact, as stated by the Buddha in his first Noble Truth, that we all suffer, and this suffering is the thing we share with all people. This suffering joins us. It should not make us feel alone.
We are in an interesting time in the treatment of mental illness. Mental illnesses, by some, are viewed as biochemical diseases to be treated with medicine. Therapy stumbles into individual isolation, promoting positive thinking over spiritual struggle. We have become so secular in our approach to the treatment of mental illness that we have overlooked the very real suffering of our souls. We have overlooked our foundation of faith. We miss the true possibility of healing as we medicalize every challenge we face and place all of our responsibility for healing, all of our responsibility for each other, into pills prescribed like candy. Pills that make us numb to the suffering of others. Pills that make us numb to our own suffering, even though that suffering, that connection with ourselves, our communities and those we will never know but can still feel responsible for, is the very connection to healing, inclusion, forgiveness and faith. The very connection to life.
I do not mean to condemn the very medicine that has made my life with bipolar disorder manageable. But the medicine is not enough. The medicine tells me nothing about the world I live in or my place in it. It gives me the stability to find answers, but it is not a cure. It is only a beginning.
It's been said that if we could see the demons that populate the world life would be unbearable. But I believe that the pathologizing of suffering, the idea that our suffering is the result of a mental illness to be treated without an appeal to our soul or any semblance of faith, is even more unbearable. I’m struck by how many young people, all of them with some expanded diagnosis and the medicine to treat it, find no meaning in life. There is meaning, but to find it we must discover and deal with our own and others’ suffering. We must find the faith to join together in the admission of and helplessness before that thing we all share in common. Suffering.
There was a giant inflatable dragon in the pool of the resort. My daughter and a group of new friends launched raids against other groups of kids for the dragon. She called it World War IV, because, as she said, World War III was already happening. Beyond the pool lay the ocean. We swam in it every day. It offered the soft sand and the gentle waves and a strong undertow that would pull you away if you weren’t vigilant of and compliant with the power of nature.
That uncomfortable mix of vigilance and compliance is the only effective tool we can muster against suffering. If only we can find the faith. There we will find the answers and the meaning. The pool bar turned out not to be a place where difficulties were numbed, but a place where honest conversations with total strangers about the little battles we all face left us intoxicated with possibility. For in suffering there is possibility. The possibility of healing and the possibility of connection.
We all suffer, but we need not suffer in vain. Together, with faith and with meaning, we shall overcome.
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