On Pain and Suffering

Bite

As Haruki Murakami narrates in the foreword to ‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running’, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

We will all feel pain and hurt in the course of our lives. This pain can range in intensity from a papercut or pinprick to debilitating injury or heartbreak. Regardless of the degree or form in which this pain comes, it heralds a paradigm shift in your perception of the world. Suffering is caused by your refusal or inability to adjust to this newly established paradigm.

All suffering is caused by our inability to reconcile what is, and what we think should be. As humans, we tend to deny or reject situations which are unpleasant or which hurt us. We suffer because of this refusal to embrace our pain. If we are ever to escape it, we must learn to elevate our consciousness to the new state which our pain is trying to shepherd us towards.

Huey Freeman of the legendary animated tv series The Boondocks recites this quote from Khalil Gibran;