On Suffering and Life

Sometimes there is a sentence or passage we read that makes us think about everything differently.  Pain and suffering are not topics I like to think about, but my pleasure reading this week has caused me to consider both and what they mean to me and my life. 

For me, ideal life changing experiences would be finding the love of my life, rewarding missionary work, or even learning something the hard way.  But suffering?  Honestly, I have not suffered a lot in life.  Sure I've had the occasional broken heart, even lost family members that I mourned for a long time- but not the kind of suffering I have been reading about.      

There is a passage in Stolen Lives: Twenty Years In A Desert Jail that got me thinking about how I view life and how our attitudes about life change.  If you are not familiar with the book, Stolen Lives is a narration of the ordeal the Oufkir family lived through at the hands of the Moroccan monarch.  The following passage is near the beginning of the book, immediately following Malika's description of a childhood spent in palaces and a privileged life as a young adult.   

           "It is painful and unfair.  But today I have a different attitude to life: it can't be 

            constructed from superficial things, no matter how attractive they may appear.

            .........Pain gave me a new life.  If there had not been all that waste, all that  

            horror- I'd almost venture to say that my suffering made me grow.  In

            any case it changed me.  For the better." 

The remainder of the book goes on to detail some hard to read conditions, had to put the book down more than once I was cringing so much.

I certainly can understand how one's understandings of life can mean so much more when you have lived through some horrifying experience.  Pain and suffering definitely force people to grow and learn, but can my life be just as full without it?

Will I ever be able to value my life and really understand it the way others do?  Or will I only ever have half the appreciation others are capable of achieving just because I don't suffer.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to suffer any more than I have to, but after reading the last couple books that I have part of me feels that I will never reach the same level of understanding without suffering. 

In The Art of Happiness, the other book that I read on suffering and pain the Dalai Lama refers to the writing of Victor Frankl.  I am somewhat familiar with some of Frankl's writings and observations, but this quote helped me some:

" Man is ready and willing to shoulder any suffering as long as he can see a meaning in it." 

In one of my favorite and most memorable discussions with a close friend years ago, he told me that suffering is what makes us interesting.  That statement stuck with me, and I have rolled it over and over in my head, but this is the first time I can actually think about it and actually believe it.