Know the difference between pain and suffering
Buddhism’s basic view of living this life as a human being is that suffering is not only unavoidable but also necessary for growing, even for experiencing freedom.
This might hit you as bleak or confusing — but that’s only because our society tells us a story in the opposite order: that we should never suffer, and if we do suffer we should puff ourselves up or go buy something, a new shirt or a cheeseburger.
That’s the upper class telling of it anyway. Those that work for a living rather than make their money by owning property acknowledge suffering through “hard work” — working for someone else is just how it is, a necessary part of being human and even the path towards living a good, meaningful life.
But Buddhism’s view, as far as I can tell, is pre-difference in class, race, gender, and so on. It puts words to living as a human being no matter the conditions, and offers practices, mainly meditation, for coping and even thriving within suffering.
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I should explain what Buddhism means by “suffering.”
Suffering is different than pain. It’s not what happens to you. It’s not the physical pain of a headache or the emotional pain of someone breaking your heart. It’s what you do to yourself. Suffering is that pang of dissatisfaction when you can’t get what you want, when you can’t make the pain go away. It’s an additional layer on top of pain that you add by wishing things were different than they are.
There’s a metaphor for suffering called “the second arrow.” The first arrow is pain, which is inevitable in life. We’re all bound to have our heart broken by someone we deeply love or to be disrespected (or arbitrarily idolized) because of the body we were born with. The second arrow is what you add on top of this pain — you shoot it yourself. You read into what happens to you and wear it like armor to supposedly protect yourself from future pain. I must be unlovable. I’m broken.
Together, we have to do our best to lessen the pain of the first arrow for everyone, to fight to change who has power in this backwards society so that we crush injustice for good. But in the meantime we can learn to watch our tendency to suffer on top of the pain and accept things as they are in the present moment. In fact, these things can and should be done at the same time.
