Life is Pain

Due to a chronic health condition, I've been thinking a lot about pain lately. Particularly, about how to deal with pain, about what persistent pain does to the body and the mind, about how it colonizes your thoughts and has you continually looking over your shoulder awaiting its onset or return. The First Noble Truth of the Buddha states (in the Pali language) sarvam dukkham - "All is pain." Some have translated this to mean, "Life is suffering," but I prefer the more literal translation that "all is pain." As a non sequitur, I was really surprised to see this line appear in the movie The Princess Bride. If you don't believe me, here's the clip:

Anyways, the Buddha argued that pain is the great leveler of human experience: there is no person who will avoid sickness, aging, and death. Seeing firsthand the pervasiveness of such pain, as depicted in the temple mural below, is supposedly what drove Siddhartha Gautama to undertake the spiritual journey that led him to become the Buddha.

Of course, there are those who endure far more than others, who are wracked with constant pain and disability throughout life, to the point where they are veritably imprisoned in a damaged cage of a body. What would it be like to be trapped in a physical form consisting of unremitting pain or, alternatively, one that is robbed of sensation, that has lost the ability to respond to one's commands? Not long ago, we lost Stephen Hawking, who endured the ravages of Lou Gehrig's Disease to produce brilliant insights into the workings of the universe. A few years back, I watched the film version of his life, The Theory of Everything. In the heartbreaking scene below, he fantasizes about performing the simplest action -- picking up a pen -- that is beyond his broken body, yet in the midst of that thought, delivers

Is that the key to living with pain - "However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at." Certainly there are many examples of those who've overcome pain or disability to achieve great things. Think of Helen Keller, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, or someone like Christopher Reeve, who brought prominence and dignity to the issue of spinal paralysis. In the following clip from several years ago, he connects with a fan who has also suffered paralysis.

Years ago, while teaching a course on science and the human condition, we read an article about Brooke Hopkins, a retired English professor from the University of Utah who broke his neck while mountain biking. Discussing the daily mechanical interventions needed to prolong his life and reading the descriptions of the constant physical torment he endures, I could not escape the recurrent, shameful thought, "thank goodness I'm not him."

But as Reeve points out in the clip, that is false comfort. As the Buddha saw, life is pain. Infirmity, illness, and death are the great predators that inevitably catch us all. We are all one freak accident or unexpected illness away from a changed life.

So, what's to be done? I am not sure, but my mind goes back to something I saw about two months ago. My wife and I stayed at a Bed and Breakfast in Valparaiso where you could birdwatch through beautiful picture windows and listen to the bird songs via microphones. There was a little bird we saw with a deformed, diseased eye. It could not fly as high or as fast as the other birds. Surely it would be preyed upon or dead by the next day, we thought. The next morning, though, it was back. And both days, it sang. Singing is an instinctive, territorial response in most birds, so this was not an expression of happiness or pleasure, as many people sometimes take it. But, despite its pain and disability, the bird kept on doing what it was driven to do. Could I be that strong? Hawking and Reeve and others have been able to push on and do remarkable things despite the traumas they suffered. They, as perhaps we all should aspire to, "sang" in their own ways and in the face of a life that is pain.