Suffering is inevitable. Life is hard. It's unfair. People you love will die. You'll die. People suffer. As paradoxical as it sounds, accepting these facts makes for a much easier life. Or if not easier acceptance of suffering at least allows you to live life. The fact that you, or those you love, or strangers suffer does not mean that life can not also be filled with joy. In fact by accepting the wholeness of life we can appreciate the contrasts. It gives us more colors in our palatte and a richer vocabulary to tell our story.
Suffering is relative, it's personal and it may not be possible for one person to communicate, or another to understand, what suffering means. What causes me pain may not faze you or vice-versa. It's very age dependent - 16 year olds and 60 year olds have very different ideas about suffering (one would hope anyway). It's very situational dependent. I can only imagine that a person living comfortably in a middle class home in North America has a very different idea of suffering then someone in a refugee camp...someone in prison...someone in pain.
People get in trouble when they try to avoid all suffering - addictions of all sorts are attempts to avoid suffering.
People use other less drastic means then drugs and alcohol to try and avoid suffering, the hard stuff of life, scary stuff, truly bad news. First and foremost is television.
Television, not religion - as Karl Marx claimed, is the "opiate of the masses". How many God!@#$% times do I have to see the story about that girl in Aruba? For me zero...but I surf the channels and I see that story running and running and running. It's not news. It's not impacting anyone other than that girl and people who knew and loved her. There's all kinds of crime/murder/missing people all over the world, all the time - why that story?
Because you can watch it and not think. You aren't going to Aruba, you aren't 18, you don't know her...it's nothing. But it fills time and minds. Ditto for the continuous loop stuff on any of the cable news networks. It's mind numbing useless information. There isn't enough information to cause one to think or ponder or reflect or form a new idea beyond what is being fed to you....just a stream of distractions. My recommendation...
Turn off the T.V.
I'm not a purist - there are educational or entertaining or escapist things on T.V. that are fine. It's just not fine to have it going to the point where you lose the ability to reflect, to be with yourself, to read, to write...to live.
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Wishing you a wonder-filled week.
