Real vs Imaginary Suffering 

I’m reading an incredible book. One of those ones that has the gripability (yes - entirely made up, but works doesn't it?) of a blockbuster but the depth and meaning of a prayer. Aptly it’s called ‘Hope in the Dark’, and it’s written by Rebecca Solnit. In it, she champions holding onto hope despite there being such all-encompassing causes to despair. It speaks to a knowing in me that I don’t have empirical evidence to bolster – yet feels unequivocal. This gnosis in me, that says however far the pendulum swings into the darkness – it returns a perfectly equilibrated thrust into the light. It’s more than intuition. My marrow communicates this to me, unflinchingly. Woo-woo or otherwise, Hegel also foreshadowed this with his historical dialectic of polarity. 

The original edition of Solnit’s book was published in the wake of the United States invasion of Iraq; 6 years to be precise. Solnit zooms out and assesses what was justifiably a bleak moment in the moral of the world. Despite relentless reasons to be submerged into sadness, her book meticulously traces a multitude of seedlings of potential hope. She maps, globally, counter-cultural ruckuses; revolutions great & small and reverberations of people-powered change. It made me think of a conversation I had on a flight recently with a young, insatiably intelligent Bangladeshi scientist and activist who told me that in her country, as of the 9th of August, they *the people* have ousted a corrupt, tyrannical government. How? Mass protest. Civil disobedience. All of the things, the nay-sayers would have you believe are futile and unable to catalyse societal change. In its place, there is now an elected 21-person, interim government, led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus as the chief advisor. Where was that revolution on our news channels? 

One of Solnit’s most illustrative examples of a countervailing force of good to evil, is the fact that a staggering volume of people mobilised across the world in the face of the atrocity of the U.S.’s foreign intervention and proxy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early noughties. Believe it or not, somewhere between 12-30 million people took to the streets on the 15th of February 2003. Which leads to the question, how many people are marching, protesting for the horrors in Gaza, and indeed across the Occupied Palestinean Territories, in this particular dark chapter of our co-created history? It’s likely we will never know. Due, in part, to deliberate underreporting. The most recent national demo in Dublin, on Saturday the 5th of October, was among the biggest protests in the country in a decade according to many commentators. Sadly however, RTÉ’s and many broadsheets’ coverage refer hazily to “thousands”. Similarly, in the ‘Descend on Shannon’ demo on Saturday the 12th, not only were attendees divided up in order to dilute numbers, but all media reportage seems to have wildly underestimated the total crowd.

The mood of Solnit's book reminds me of this quote from Nadeem Aslam “Despair has to be earned. I personally have not done all I can to change things. I haven’t yet earned the right to despair.” Displaced from an authoritarian regime in Pakistan as an adolescent, he and his family set up shop in the UK. He’s now a renowned novelist. Often, I find displaced people have stretched imaginations and a remarkable capacity for empathy. They have, in effect, bridged worlds, and as a result are endowed with superpowers of insight. Solnit is also a being forged of myriad identities, with a Jewish father and an Irish-Catholic mother. Violence permeated her childhood, as such she is no stranger to suffering - she found refuge in writing. Adversity blooming beauty solicits one of my all-time favourite adages which is: No Mud; No Lotus.

My approach to suffering is inherently Buddhist. The Buddha thought & taught there are three kinds of dukkha, Sanskrit for suffering:

The first kind is physical and mental pain from the inevitable stresses of life like old age, sickness, and death i.e. gross, physiological (real).

The second is the distress we feel as a result of impermanence and change, such as the pain of failing to get what we want and of losing what we hold dear i.e. the grass is greener variety – in other words: generated through denying the ultimate nature of reality, that is flux (arguably, imaginary).

The third kind of dukkha is a kind of existential suffering, the angst of being human, of living a conditioned existence and being subject to rebirth i.e. also completely fabricated – in other words: not actually happening in the present moment, caused by trying to be places that don’t exist, namely the past/future (imaginary).

So some suffering is inevitable… But by and large, we (and that’s the Western ‘we’) can opt out of most of the ‘suffering’ that tries to snare us.. Let die any suffering you are attached to and not immediately experiencing. Any first-world problems; any drama, BS, ego-patterns, monkey mind clatter.. And then let’s get to work on the actual structural and systemic inequities that root real suffering.

Having just come back from East Africa, where I consistently observed the relationship to scarcity and suffering and spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make sense of it all. Somehow, the vast majority of the people in the communities I was in, seemed more content then so many people I see around me in the European front, “ennervated Europe” as Dorris Lessing puts it. It became apparent how attached 'we' are to suffering when I retuned. It tips the proposition that wealth is connected to happiness on its head. I don’t aim to be overly reductive on this point… Perhaps this is the springboard of next weeks’ musings.

At the crucible of my thought train this week is this: there’s more than enough genuine suffering happening out there in the world. If you are lucky enough to have safety, four-walls, the warm embrace of a loved one, enough food to fill your belly – don’t dwell too much in misery. Know how precious and rare this life is…. And if you have even a few spare energies or resources, direct them toward Others who don’t have the same fortune you do.

Here's a poem by an anonymous Sufi to help you pull the wheat from the chaff. A device to help discern the imaginary type of suffering:

I have come to Break

that bond

You made with sorrow

That pulls you under

Like shells to sand

Which somehow

Compels you

To forget

You are a wave

In this boundless ocean

Instead

You get pulled

By tides

As if your

All alone waiting

For the sky

To take you

Home

Again

What madness

Came upon you

To doubt

The secret longing

Of the moon

Whose beauty is

Both empty and form

For without the dark

How would we ever know

The beauty of light

Without tears

How would

We ever

Taste the salt

Of the oceans longing

Nothing, my friend

Is broken

It’s just a matter

Of different

Shades of light

In the forest

There are a thousand

Song birds

Forever

Calling your name

How do I know?

I listen to the dawn

Cracking

The world

Open

With silence.