Why You Might Never Be Satisfied
Unless you train your mind to do this.
What makes a terminally ill man want to bring a child into the world?
Paul Kalanithi, a hard-working neurosurgeon with mere months to live, did just that. Here’s a conversation he had with his wife, Lucy, following his diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer in 2013: Lucy: “Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together? Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?” Paul: “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?”
Two years later, just shy of his baby daughter’s first birthday, Paul said goodbye forever. He was 37. While writing his memoir When Breath Becomes Air, Paul said he felt that “life wasn’t about avoiding suffering [1].” Leaning into life’s challenges in the face of death is what made his life worth living — and lean he did.
But if life isn’t avoiding suffering, what is it?
Some say life is suffering. That’s what the Buddha taught. But his teaching has been lost in translation. In the West, we’ve made life about suffering to “get ahead.” When the Buddha taught that life is suffering, he used the Pali (Sanskrit) word dukkha. Rather than enduring physical and emotional pain, dukkha means impermanence; that life is transient, inconstant, fleeting.
The moment we’re born, the dying process begins. Our bodies atrophy. Our minds decay. The minds and bodies of those we love follow the same process. Everything we touch slips away as we tighten our grip, as if we’re trying to grab drops of water. And yet, we continue grasping. Nearly every thought is absorbed by what we could grab next. If only we could get that better job with that bigger salary. But does grasping at bigger drops of water make water any less impossible to hold on to?
Should we just stop reaching? The problem isn’t in trying to achieve something, but in assuming that, until we do, we’re somehow incomplete. We suffer because our minds leap ahead of our current circumstances.
But we also exist precisely because our minds leap ahead of our current circumstances. Evolution has favored this trait, and our ancestors wouldn’t have survived without it. Unfortunately, our progeny won’t survive long with it. Constantly leaping ahead is one of the reasons for our rising inequality, worsening mental health, and increasingly destructive nuclear arsenal — we call it the arms race for a reason.
Leaving the global consequences aside, there’s an arms race happening within the confines of each of our individual minds. We suffer simply because we can’t seem to lay down our arms. It’s true that life isn’t about avoiding suffering, because suffering isn’t avoidable. Impermanence is the nature of all things. That’s why the current moment is all that truly exists.
That said, having a desire for something to happen in the future isn’t where we run into trouble; wishing for the present moment to be in some way different is. You can aspire to become a successful novelist, but if you write each page with the wish that you already were, you’ll miss the story.
Worse still, your suffering is not a localized problem. It spreads like a disease to everyone around you, beginning with those you love most. But diseases can be isolated, understood, and sometimes even cured.
Studies are now showing that meditation makes us more willing to take action to relieve suffering. It does so by decreasing activity in the amygdala— the part of the brain responsible for emotional experience — in moments when we’re experiencing suffering. At the same time, the brain circuits responsible for producing feelings of love and compassion are activated [2]. Reducing suffering and deepening our relationships with others is primarily a matter of training the mind.
You can strive to live a meaningful life, achieving great things along the way, without being unhappy in your current circumstances. You can recognize, moment to moment, that there’s nothing missing. You can think less and live more. You don’t have to wait to be wealthy; being wealthy is realizing you have enough. In all walks of life, if you “realize there’s nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you [3].” Ironically, when you accept the impermanence of life, time stretches infinitely in the present moment.
What if Paul Kalanithi would’ve spent his last months on earth thinking about when he might be taken from it? Would he have truly experienced what it’s like to become a father? Would he have appreciated his unique ability to save the human life currently on his operating table? Would living or dying have been more painful?
Before his breath became air, Paul left his daughter this letter:
“When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied… We are never so wise as when we live in the moment.”
Sources
[1] Kalanithi, P., & Verghese, A. (2016). When breath becomes air. New York: Random House.
[2] Weng, H. Y., Fox, A. S., Shackman, A. J., Stodola, D. E., Caldwell, J. Z., Olson, M. C., . . . Davidson, R. J. (2013). Compassion Training Alters Altruism and Neural Responses to Suffering. Psychological Science,24(7), 1171–1180. doi:10.1177/0956797612469537
[3] Tzu, L., & Mitchell, S. (2015). Tao te ching. London: Frances Lincoln.
