Bear the Pain and Play Your Role

Life is full of pain and suffering. We are told that we shouldn’t suffer and that we should always be in a state of, if not bliss, at least contentedness. The Buddha knew better.

His first truth of life is that life is suffering. It’s not just suffering, of course, it is a lot more things, and it is undeniably beautiful in many ways, but the hard truth is that suffering is a big chunk of it.

If suffering is going to be a constant in life, I think it is appropriate to know how to handle it. Michel de Montaigne argues in his essay “The taste of good and evil things depends on our opinion” that we are not so much afraid of death, as we are of pain.

He says that death happens in an instant, but that the pain that accompanies it, that’s what we deal with the most, and also scares us the most. He then begins to talk about ‘bearing the pain’, which I found to be a profound and life-changing way of living life.

The pains of life are there, and they are not going anywhere, but the idea of bearing your pain is there as well, which is something not a lot of people do. People, and I include myself amongst them, many times are ‘led’ by their pain, for the simple reason of not asking the question: Is it possible for me to bear this pain? Or is this pain so grand that I just cannot stand it or control it? Is this pain so big…