Insight into Suffering Provides Some Relief

In the Woody Allen film Annie Hall, Alvie Singer (Woody Allen) says to Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) that life is made up of “the horrible and the miserable.” The horrible includes people who are suffering from such things as being “blind” or “crippled.” The miserable includes “all the rest of us.” A joke. And yet, it contains a core truth about the pain involved in being human.

In line with this, it was over 2500 years ago that Buddha taught that, “Life is suffering.” He also revealed how to overcome suffering and find enlightenment. Finding relief from our suffering is a central theme of all of my books.

While I was watching the film Life or Something Like It, I found myself reflecting on the human suffering we experience when confronting our mortality. Faced with the prospect of dying in one week, Lanie (Angelina Jolie) is a young, beautiful television news reporter who finds her true self. Her awakening is given a boost by her cameraman Pete (Ed Burns). Pete confronts her by calling her life “a meaningless quest for the approval of others.”

This is our choice: Will we engage in the meaningful inner quest for our true self where we discover our heart? Or, will we engage in the meaningless outer quest for fulfillment in the outer world?
As I left the movie, I felt a deep compassion in my heart for how much suffering there is in the world. I found myself thinking of all the suffering I have seen among my loved ones. Earlier in the day, I was at a store where I saw a little boy, a toddler. His tiny hands were misshapened. They resembled lobster claws. As I watched him toddling along next to his father, I could see how much his father loved and cherished him. And then I felt a clenching in my heart. I imagined how it might be for this innocent little boy as he went through school. Kids can be so cruel when someone is physically different. Then something surprising happened. I felt a twinge of pain in my heart as I contemplated his future along with a peaceful acceptance of how painful life can be.

What causes emotional suffering? Stress. Once again, I define stress as the pressure we feel from the perceived gap between what we would love to have happen in any given situation and our ability to attain it. For example, Robert, a tenth grader I saw when I was giving a seminar in Boston, felt the painful pressure from this gap. He had been confined to a wheelchair all of his childhood and doctors told him he would never be able to walk. Now that he was in high school, he was facing his disability head on. The result was anxiety coupled with a compelling desire to hurt himself.

As he and I talked about it, we uncovered just what his wish to hurt himself was telling him. “I hate myself for being in this wheelchair. And that’s because, I’d love it if I could walk like other kids!” Peace came only after Robert began to accept the truth of the gap between what he would love—the ability to walk—and his inability to overcome his paralysis.

Later today, I saw another toddler, a little girl, grab on to her mother’s leg. She held on for dear life. Her mother was about to go out to her car to turn off the car alarm that had been set off by accident. The woman in line next to them, a stranger, offered to stay with the little girl until the mother returned. However, the mother recognized her child’s need for her mommy and said, “Thanks for offering but she’ll cry even louder if I leave her.”

This clinging is understandable when we are little but so many of us remain clingy as adults. It is no longer our mother whom we cling to, it is her later emotional substitutes: our loved ones, bank accounts, possessions, and so forth. This clinging is the essence of what Buddha meant when he taught that attachment causes suffering. The suffering of the little girl as she clings to her mother is a perfect symbol for human suffering. At various times, we are all in a symbolic sense like that little girl clinging to mommy.

• Today, consider how it is not only that attachment causes suffering because of the loss of the person or object we are attached to. It is the fear of that loss, its imminent possibility, that tortures and torments us. Desire causes suffering since desiring is longing to have something. We feel tension in our body. We long for love and when someone shows us love, we feel momentarily fulfilled. We hunger for food and when we eat, we relax. But when the gap is too great or impossible to bridge, as it was for Robert, we suffer. Next time, we'll see how we can find solace in the recognition that nothing lasts.