Skip to main content

Meaning of Suffering

Pain by Donatella Marraoni (2018)


Suffering is either manmade or beyond man’s control. The concentration camps of Hitler and refugee camps engendered by wars are all manmade suffering. Natural calamities and epidemic outbreaks are largely beyond human control. There is also much suffering we bring upon ourselves by our actions or attitudes.
Whatever the type, suffering can never be a sanguine thing. No sane person would want to embrace suffering for any reason. The most natural tendency for normal human beings is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Yet pain is an integral part of life. There is no likelihood of your ever encountering a person who has not experienced pain of some sort. The Buddha went to the extreme of defining life as pain.
The Buddha’s solution is to put an end to our desires. Desires are the causes of pain. The Buddha is speaking about one kind of pain only, the pain we bring upon ourselves through our passions and pursuits. And his solution is neither practical nor desirable. What is life without desires, passions and pursuits? Moreover, the Buddha’s solution won’t put an end to all the suffering engendered by factors which are not in our control in any way, and much human suffering belongs to that category.
Perhaps the Serenity Prayer of Reinhold Niebuhr can give us a better solution. “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” That’s the prayer. A profoundly meaningful prayer it is. Much of our suffering can be tamed if we change certain things like our habits, attitudes, thinking, and responses to situations. We can change the situations that cause our suffering. If we cannot change them, we need to accept them gracefully.
Suffering cannot become meaningful, perhaps. But suffering can alter us in miraculous ways. Serenity is only one of the gifts of suffering.
I walked a mile with Pleasure;
She chatted all the way;
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with Sorrow;
And ne’er a word said she;
But, oh! The things I learned from her,
When Sorrow walked with me.

That’s a poem by Robert Browning Hamilton, American poet. Suffering can teach us many deep lessons of life. That is arguably the only blessing of suffering. Those lessons constitute the meaning of suffering. Suffering can shake us out of our complacencies and move us towards thinking about things that really matter in life. It can make us better human beings. Suffering can be a potent force for our personal growth and change.

I am taking my blog to the next level with Blogchatter’s #MyFriendAlexa

This post is the 7th in a series on Meaning of Life.
The 1st was: What is the meaning of life?
2nd: Religion and Meaning
3rd: Career and Meaning
4th: Science and Meaning
5th: Literature and Meaning
6th: Meaning of Meaninglessness
8th and the last will be: Love: the ultimate meaning






Comments

  1. Srishti RajeevSeptember 16, 2019 at 11:03 PM

    Desire is the cause of pain is true to an extent. Heavy but much needed read

    ReplyDelete
  2. Arti_amidst berries of lifeSeptember 16, 2019 at 11:32 PM

    I'm still not able to understand what exactly is a suffering

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sanjota PurohitSeptember 17, 2019 at 5:54 AM

    Sometimes I feel it is all in our head. We just need to learn to be happy irrespective of the situation.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 17, 2019 at 6:28 AM

      Diseases, bereavement, hunger, displacement... they are objective facts out there.

      Delete
  4. Mayura AmarkantSeptember 17, 2019 at 12:33 PM

    Loved your post! Extremely poignant and thought-provoking. Keep writing such posts I love reading your thoughts. #MyFriendAlexa #DiaryOfAnInsaneWriter

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousSeptember 17, 2019 at 4:16 PM

    Wow, so succinct and profound, Tomichan! Such a gem this one! Have to read your earlier posts on this series.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Tina SequeiraSeptember 17, 2019 at 4:17 PM

    Wow, so succinct and profound, Tomichan! Such a gem this one! Have to read your earlier posts on this series.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 18, 2019 at 8:31 PM

      Will be delighted to hear your views on the other posts as well.

      Delete
  7. Manas "Sameer" MukulSeptember 18, 2019 at 7:10 PM

    Suffering is pretty subjective but I like your take on it. Nice work.
    #ContemplationOfaJoker #Jokerophilia #MyFriendAlexa

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 18, 2019 at 8:30 PM

      I don't deny the subjectivity of suffering. But suffering is universal and hence I thought of looking at it from this meaning perspective. Glad you liked it.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...
13 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...
29 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more