The Wikiness

The first noble truth of Buddhism is that with every human life comes “dukkha,” which can be translated as “suffering.”  Unless people get enlightened, says the Buddha, they will constantly be managing their dukkha, their inescapable sense of malaise. 

I find it helpful to think of “dukkha” on a spectrum, going from, on the lighter end, the feeling you get when your favorite soft drink is unavailable to, on the other, excruciating bodily pain and mental and emotional torment. As we dance with dukkha through our days, we find natural and ingenious ways to mitigate our dissatisfaction. 

When newborn me cries for sustenance, I’m dealing with a most basic form of pain. My dukkha is the discomfort of hunger. Then mother supplies food, and there goes my discontent… for a while.

When recovering from surgery, I take opiates and dull the terrible aches in my body. This directly eases my physiological dukkha. And when I arrange my life in ways that minimize having to think unpleasant thoughts or feel unfulfilled or afraid, this is also me, dancing with dukkha. 

When as an adolescent, I experience anxiety at having to get along with a room full of strangers at a party, I find myself in a state of acute disstress. But then, here you go– someone just handed me a nerve-soothing ethanol elixir! Ah. Instant pain management.

Later in life, when I fell lonely and stressed from my job, how effectively gathering with co-workers and drinking myself into an anesthetic cloud worked. Lonesome no more! At least for an hour or two.

In contemporary society, with all its unpleasant uncertainty and uncontrollable complexity, observe how all humans run to places providing coherent narratives, ones with identifiable bad guys and certain, approachable good guys. In the CNN and Fox News silos, just as as in churches and even Buddhist temples, confusion and alienation disappear. The stories we seek there soothe our gnawing unhappiness and sense that something is wrong.

“Losing ourselves” in a job, or any other potentially “flow- type activity puts us–for as long as it lasts– on a steady morphine drip of dukkha dimninution. 

How about my fears for the future and the nameless dread the news gives me? My desire that my offspring’s offspring have a life better than mine, or at least not worse, seems unlikely to be fulfilled. Storm clouds of dukkha darken the horizon for the foreseeable decades. Pondering this future, how powerless and dissatisfied I feel! 

But hold on: through a magical thing called “literature,” my fears get forgotten, my dukkha drops away. Lost in someone else’s story, my “bad” thoughts are stilled, threats disappear. I get added analgesic when I read history, or the ancients, and see how similar Homer’s people are to us, and how historic trends and cycles go on forever. Fictional or non-fiction, engaging tales are just what my dukkha doctor would order. Yet they only work for a while (cause for more dukkha.)

Whichever hobbyhorse you ride–sports, gardening, music, travel, baking, arts and crafts, your dog or your cat–you ride it away from dukkha. Even if  your hobbyhorse is sadomasochism, intentional pain is what frees you from the dull ache of dukkha..

When I attempt to compose a humorous essay on a painful subject I’m also dukkha-dealing, humor being perhaps a human’s most ancient and accessible painkiller.

Finally, consider how I minimize the painful acknowledgement of my death, knowing that all the meaningful lessons and beautiful experiences I’ve had, all the magic and tragedy of my one, precious life, will stop with my body. 

Well, “Here you go,” my pain manager says. ”Write down the stories from your one precious life.  Something of you may then endure. Reduce dukkha with the old adage, “Ars longa, vita brevis” (Art is long, life is short).