Suffering is Optional

Imagine the following scenario.

You’re walking barefoot across the family room floor when you feel a sudden, sharp jab of pain in your foot.

Your kid left their Legos on the floor and you stepped on one of them.

After you feel that intense pain, you start dancing around on one foot. You yell and curse at your child's carelessness, hurting their feelings in the process. You go on and on about how much your foot hurts, letting anger get the best of you. Finally, after you carried on long enough, you get back to your usual business, but not without a final glare and warning to clean up their mess. Then, if you’re self-aware enough, you feel like a jerk for reacting like that.

Stepping on the Lego was pain.

Everything after it, all the carrying on, all the anger, all the drama; that was suffering.

The pain you felt when you stepped on the Lego was outside of your control. Your nervous system fired pain signals to your brain, warning it that an injury might be taking place. Your body quickly responded by moving away from the source of the pain. It’s a feature of the system, not a bug.

All the suffering that happened after that was completely within your control. You chose to get angry. You chose to dance around on one foot. You chose to curse and yell.

You could have chosen an entirely different response. Upon seeing what the cause of your pain was (a silly little Lego), you could have chosen to see that you weren’t in any threat of a serious injury (a small indentation in your skin that will fade in minutes), let the pain pass (it always does), and asked your child to clean up after themselves (accidents happen).

This Lego example is obviously a simple one.

We experience much greater pain in life, both physically and emotionally, than stepping on a Lego. Bones break. Disease sets in. We get rejected. Loved ones die. Life is a battlefield and sometimes we take a direct hit.

But no matter how intense the pain, or how long it lasts, we always get a say in how much we will suffer as a result of it.

We can choose to endure pain instead of reacting emotionally to it, causing additional and unnecessary suffering.

The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius said:

“Just remember: you can endure anything your mind can make endurable.”

We can choose to endure this pain. We can choose to let it pass as gracefully as possible. We can even choose to see the good that might come from it, or the lesson to be learned.

The bone will be stronger after it heals.

The illness warns you that lifestyle changes might be in order.

The rejection will lead you towards acceptance.

The loss of a loved one teaches you to never take the people you love for granted and to treasure every moment with them.

The Lego teaches you to be more careful when you walk across the family room floor, you never know what hazards could be lying around.

Pain is mandatory. It’s baked into the human experience, whether we like it or not.

But suffering?

That’s 100% optional.

How much you choose to suffer is completely up to you.