Quiet under the wave

Tell me about a kind of pain you've had to live with rather than fix. How do you carry it? The traditions that left us their books did not, on the whole, expect us to fix it. They expected us to learn to walk with it.

There is a kind of pain that does not respond to effort. A grief that does not lift on schedule. An illness that the doctor cannot name or, naming it, cannot cure. A child who will not come home. A country that will not heal. The first thing the old books seem to want to say about this kind of suffering is that it is not strange. It is not a mistake in the order of things. It is the order of things.

"Man is born unto trouble," the book of Job says, "as the sparks fly upward." ^[1] The Qur'an puts it more bluntly: "Surely in trouble have we created man." ^[2] The Dhammapada lists existence itself among the difficult things: "Difficult to obtain is the conception of men, difficult is the life of mortals." ^[3] Job again, in a voice that does not so much complain as report: "Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down." ^[4]

This is not pessimism. It is the floor under everything else the traditions will say. Before any advice about how to carry suffering, they want to remove the surprise. You were not promised otherwise.

What the body buys

If pain is built into the fabric, the question becomes: where does it enter? The Tao Te Ching gives one of the strangest answers in any of these books. "What makes me liable to great calamity," it says, "is my having the body (which I call myself); if I had not the body, what great calamity could come to me?" ^[5] The price of being someone is being someone who can be hurt.

Several traditions go further and locate suffering not in the body alone but in what the body wants. The Gita is severe about this: "The joys springing from sense-life are but quickening wombs which breed sure griefs: those joys begin and end!" ^[6] The Dhammapada asks, almost angrily, "How is there laughter, how is there joy, as this world is always burning?" ^[7] Even Proverbs, less cosmic in its framing, notices the same machinery in miniature: "Hope deferred maketh the heart sick." ^[8] Wanting is itself a place where pain can enter.

This is not the only voice in the canon. The Psalmist, walking the valley of the shadow, does not renounce his hopes; he leans on a companion: "I will fear no evil: for thou art with me." ^[9] The renunciate and the trusting believer carry different things in different ways. The point worth holding is that several of these traditions agree the body and its longings are not neutral terrain — they are where the weather comes in.

The unmoved soul

What, then, should the inner posture be? Here the traditions converge on a word that sounds, in English, colder than it should: equanimity. The Gita praises "the soul that with a strong and constant calm takes sorrow and takes joy indifferently." ^[10] The Dhammapada describes the same temperament from another angle: "Whether touched by happiness or sorrow wise people never appear elated or depressed." ^[11] Confucius, characteristically, observes the difference under pressure: "The superior man may indeed have to endure want, but the mean man, when he is in want, gives way to unbridled license." ^[12]

Marcus Aurelius, writing to himself at night, made this his lifelong study. "The art of true living in this world," he wrote, "is more like a wrestler's, than a dancer's practice. For in this they both agree, to teach a man whatsoever falls upon him, that he may be ready for it, and that nothing may cast him down." ^[13] The image is honest about what equanimity asks. It is not grace. It is grip. It is staying on your feet.

Marcus also believed, more controversially, that the trouble itself is not where the trouble lives. "Remember that all is but opinion, and all opinion depends of the mind. Take thine opinion away, and then as a ship that hath stricken in within the arms and mouth of the harbour, a present calm." ^[14] Elsewhere, more forcefully: whatever troubled you "was not without anywhere that thou shouldest come out of it, but within in thine own opinions, from whence it must be cast out, before thou canst truly and constantly be at ease." ^[15]

This is a bracing doctrine. It is also one many sufferers cannot, and should not, simply accept. Some pain is in the body. Some grief is in the loss itself, and no rearrangement of opinion will dissolve it. The traditions know this too.

Letting grief be grief

Against the Stoic temptation to master sorrow by reframing it, another current in the canon insists that grief must be allowed its weight. Confucius, asked about ceremony, said: "In the ceremonies of mourning, it is better that there be deep sorrow than a minute attention to observances." ^[16] When someone reproached him for mourning a beloved disciple too violently, he answered: "If I am not to mourn bitterly for this man, for whom should I mourn?" ^[17]

Ecclesiastes goes further and warns that understanding itself enlarges grief: "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." ^[18] To know more is to have more to lose, and to see it sooner.

The most exact instructions on how to be near someone in pain come from the rabbis. From Pirkei Avot: "Do not try to appease your friend during his hour of anger; nor comfort him at the hour while his dead still lies before him." ^[19] And the great image, from Job, of what friendship looked like before it began to argue: "So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great." ^[20] Seven days of silence. The first thing to do with another's pain is to refuse to hurry it.

Job himself was given no consolation that arrived on time. "The thing which I greatly feared is come upon me," he says. "I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came." ^[21] The text does not rush him out of that sentence.

Endurance as practice

Still, the day after the seven days of silence comes, and the sufferer has to keep living. What then? Here the traditions begin to speak of endurance not as gritting one's teeth but as a discipline — something one practices, the way one practices an instrument.

The Dhammapada offers an image of trained restraint: "Silently shall I endure abuse as the elephant in battle endures the arrow sent from the bow: for the world is ill-natured." ^[22] Elsewhere it speaks more gently: "Like a well-trained horse when touched by the whip, be ye active and lively… you will overcome this great pain." ^[23] The elephant and the horse are both bearing something. The point is the training that came before.

Marcus Aurelius reframes endurance medicinally. "The physician hath prescribed unto this man, riding; unto another, cold baths… so it is alike to say, The nature of the universe hath prescribed unto this man sickness, or blindness, or some loss." We accept harsh prescriptions, he says, "in hope of health, and recovery." ^[24] Whether one finds this consoling or maddening will depend on whether one believes the universe is a physician at all. Marcus believed it. Job, for stretches, did not. Both voices remain in the canon.

The Qur'an, addressing the Prophet in his weariness, counsels patience with a near task: "Now know We that thy heart is distressed at what they say: But do thou celebrate the praise of thy Lord, and be of those who bow down in worship; and serve thy Lord till the certainty o'ertake thee." ^[25] Endurance here is not a clenched jaw; it is a daily return to small acts that hold a life in place until something changes.

What suffering might be for

The boldest claim the traditions make is that pain, rightly carried, is going somewhere. The book of Job, even in its suffering, contains the line: "Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth… for he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole." ^[26] The Qur'an remembers Job's cry — "Truly evil hath touched me: but thou art the most merciful of those who shew mercy" — and the answer: "So we heard him, and lightened the burden of his woe." ^[27]

The Gita, characteristically, reaches further. Good pleasure, it says, is the pleasure "bitter at first as poison to the soul, but afterward sweet as the taste of Amrit." ^[28] The discipline that hurts now is what one drinks later as the undying wine. And in another passage Krishna promises that whoever turns toward him in full devotion — "him will I swiftly lift forth from life's ocean of distress and death." ^[29]

Even the austere Pirkei Avot, describing the life of one who studies Torah — "you shall eat bread with salt, and rationed water shall you drink; you shall sleep on the ground, your life will be one of privation" — ends not with grim acceptance but with a benediction: "Happy shall you be in this world, and it shall be good for you in the world to come." ^[30]

These are claims one cannot prove from inside the pain. They are heard, in the middle of suffering, either as a hand on the shoulder or as an offense. The Psalmist puts the whole condition in a single conditional: "I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living." ^[31] He does not say he saw it. He says he believed he would. That is sometimes all a sufferer has, and sometimes it is enough to keep walking.

What we are left with

The traditions, taken together, do not give one answer about how to carry what cannot be put down. They give a small set of things you can do with it. You can recognize that it is not unusual. You can train yourself, over years, not to be capsized by it. You can let it be as heavy as it is, and let other people sit on the ground with you in silence. You can treat the bearing of it as a practice, like the elephant in the arrows, like the wrestler on his feet. You can hope, if you can, that it is making something of you, or being made into something by a hand you cannot see.

None of these cancels the others. On a given afternoon you may need all of them, or only one, or none, and only the silence of a friend.

Questions for the reader

• Which posture toward suffering — Stoic mastery, full mourning, patient endurance, hope of release — most resembles how you actually carry your pain? Which one do you wish you could borrow?
• Who has sat on the ground with you, wordless, when your grief was very great? Whom could you sit with now?
• Is there a pain in your life that you have been trying to fix when, in fact, what it asks of you is to be carried?