Bodhi Girl made a comment about my little medical incident last week that really got me thinking. She pointed out that my predicament made it very easy to remember the First Noble Truth, that is the truth of suffering. More precisely, that life is suffering.
On a First Noble Truth Scale, that particular bit of suffering was probably only about a five. I mean, it hurt but there are some truly horrific things experienced by people everywhere on a daily basis. Apparently though there has been some debate about what level of suffering was meant by the Buddha. There are those who say that when speaking of the First Noble Truth, the Buddha meant the sort of general dissatisfaction that come with being human.
I’m still very new at all of this but I have to think that the Buddha meant more than that. However, if we were to find out that’s what he meant, I could go along with that. We see people that overcome horrendous difficulties to not just weedle their way out from under them but to triumph and become better than they were. It’s the “thousand cuts” that seem to really tear an individual down. The tiny pinpricks of disappointments and humiliations and disregards that hurt one so greatly and so frequently that they give in and give up.
Some of us reach a point in our lives where we realize that this is happening to us and we make a decision to defend ourselves against the little hurts fed to us by others. Hey, that’s why I stopped using Windows™.
But some of us go too far. In an effort to defend ourselves, we build up walls around ourselves. We strike first. We hurt others before they can hurt us. We become the handers out of the thousand cuts. And Buddhist or not, we all know about Karma. What goes around comes around. What goes up, must come down. When it comes to dealing out cuts, a thousand out is a thousand back.
So what do we do? Well, the path I’m taking is leading me in a direction that will – should – is supposed to – BETTER – help me deal with those situations in a way that is healthy not only for me, but for others as well. But not everybody can or will choose to take this path. Certainly many will find other paths that lead them to the same place but others will not. What of them? What will they do? How will they cope? And how will those around them cope?
I don’t know. I’m asking.
Love the Windows jab. Lol.
I’ve always thought that the suffering included everything…when your shoe lace breaks when you are already late getting to work to the horrors of poverty and hunger. There are just to many ways to parse suffering so I put it all in one basket. And as for others that don’t try to stop the flow of cuts….I just don’t know. It’s very sad to live that way.