Submitted by Charles Knighton
“Perspective is a funny thing, and I have learned over the years to welcome the adversity in life so I can have a better perspective and in turn strive to be a better human being.”
Nigel Wallace, August 18 Advocate
It is a cornerstone of Buddhism that life is suffering. That’s not to say that life is only suffering: of course it can also be joy, excitement, sharing, learning and other wonderful exhilarating things. But the fact remains that suffering is inevitable. If we are lucky enough, we’ll avoid war, poverty or rejection, but even the most blessed lives can not escape old age or illness.
How we deal with the inevitable suffering of life, then, has been a central concern of all the great philosophers, religions and wisdom traditions. All agree it cannot be avoided, so what matters is how we understand and respond to it.
For many ancient Greek philosophers, particularly the Stoics, the answer was that if you adopted the right attitude, suffering couldn’t harm you. You might face terrible misfortune, pain, even death, but if none of these things cracks your integrity, your virtue, you are, in a deeper sense, unscathed.
Christianity took the bold step of embracing suffering as the road to redemption. In the Sermon on the Mount, those who weep and are persecuted are called the blessed, while Christ’s own crucifixion becomes a model for the pious life. Nietzsche later rejected this as a debilitating embrace of misery and powerlessness. Still, suffering retained a central role in his own ethical outlook, something to be overcome by will.
At their best, what all these approaches get right is the idea that there are very few things, if any, which are unambiguously good or bad in the long run. That’s because a whole life is not a simple aggregate of its parts, but a blend. To take a culinary analogy: vinegar by itself is sour and unpleasant but, combined with the right other ingredients, it can lift a dish to new heights.
The analogy cautions against taking itself too far. Many bitter plants can never be made palatable and many others spoil dishes more often than they improve them. But much of the time, it is how they fit together that matters most, not how delicious they are in their pure form.
So it is that the components of life can be good, bad or indifferent in themselves, but they take on a different meaning depending on how they are made to fit the whole. So, for example, although illness is bad in itself, it is at least sometimes possible to respond to it in ways that extract some benefit. In that sense, suffering is never good, but still we can make good use of it and use its bitterness to draw out what is sweet and savory in life.
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