Whispering Wyrd

I was remembering a conversation I had many years ago. At the time, I had just gone from building power lines to working in IT for a massive online trading corporation with offices around the country. It was a big shift, not just in the work itself, but in the culture. I had to learn how to “play nice” in a corporate office environment, which felt completely foreign after life on a contract line crew.

One coworker on my team had also come from construction, so we connected right off the bat. He helped me understand office politics, which seemed mind boggling and ridiculous to both of us. We laughed a lot about “office people” behavior.

But we also had deeper conversations. One day when things were unusually slow we started talking about how heaven and hell might not just be places people imagine after death, but also states of mind we experience right here and now.

Imagine seeing a breathtaking sunset. The sky is just on fire with color. You feel gratitude just to be alive and able to witness it. Now imagine seeing that exact same sunset while dealing with a toothache, crushing anxiety, or the grief of losing someone you love.

The sunset didn’t change, but your inner world did. Pain, worry, anger, fear, grief, all of these can become so overwhelming that they completely drown out the beauty still there all around us. Anyone who has suffered deeply knows this.

Anger used to do that to me more than anything. It consumed me for years. Drugs and alcohol only fueled it. I can remember being so angry I thought I might have a stroke or heart attack, but half the time I didn’t even know why I was angry. In that state of mind, beauty became completely invisible.

Worry had a similar power over me. I remember reading in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus said not to worry and how futile worry is. But at the time, I didn’t know how to stop worrying and Jesus never explained how to stop worrying. He just said “don’t worry”. Knowing worry is harmful and knowing how to stop it are two very different things. I am not knocking Christianity in any way, form, or fashion here… I’m only stating my own experience.

One of the gifts Buddhism gave me was a clearer understanding of the difference between pain and suffering. It taught me step by step in great detail how to stop worrying. Pain is part of life. Loss is part of life. Illness, heartbreak, aging, uncertainty… none of us can escape these things.

But suffering gets stronger when we cling tightly to the pain, when we build our whole identity around it, when we tell ourselves it will never get better, or when we believe all goodness has vanished because pain is here right now.

That doesn’t mean that we deny the pain. It doesn’t mean we pretend tragedy isn’t tragic. It doesn’t mean we shame anyone or ourselves for grieving or struggling. It just means that even in pain, there may still be a little space around it. A little breath, a little kindness, and a little beauty that has not completely disappeared.

I was reminded of this recently when I fell in a mountain river and dislocated my thumb. The pain was immediately excruciating. For a minute it was hard to even breathe because of the intensity of the pain. But I was standing in cold water on unstable rocks, so I had to focus on getting safely out first.

The pain was real but in that moment pain didn’t have to become panic, even though the rushing water kept trying to keep me down. Even now, it still hurts sometimes. But I’ve learned that when I obsess over it, resist it, or make it the center of everything, it gets worse. When I acknowledge it without clinging to it, it becomes easier to manage.

That’s what I mean by separating pain from suffering. Some burdens are heavy. Some losses are life changing. Some grief can’t be rushed. But maybe, even there, we can suffer a little less. Not by denying the pan, but by not attaching to it.  And by remembering that pain can be there while beauty still exists.

Amituofo
~Buck