Suffering as Attendant to Life...or Perhaps a 'Better' Life?
Is there something to the suffering we undergo? No matter the source or how long it lasts? 🤷♂️ What about those folks who undertake more of it by choice? 🤨
I have to highlight the contrast in the title picture before saying anything else; it’s one of the reasons I’m loving Utah. Traipsing about Bryce Canyon National Park last week we came across red rock skyscrapers and the effects of millions of years of water erosion. The hikes were packed with folks speaking multiple languages and temps reached the mid-70s by the time we drove back through the park gates at lunchtime. And not even ten miles to the west (as the crow flies) stands the Dixie National Forest, in which you’ll find lush evergreens and snow still on the ground. We spent the night in the same spot all weekend. Astounding.
“Metaphysics Before Ethics”
I must always remind myself that worldview dictates nearly everything, including the assumptions we make about whether what we’re saying will make sense to a total stranger. Though I can’t find the quotation or even in from which part of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae it comes, when I heard Bishop Barron paraphrase Aquinas by saying that metaphysics necessarily precedes ethics, I immediately knew that had to be right. Barron made his point in the middle of a discussion on modern ethics and whether we can derive principles from the “scientific” research we conduct on the regular. Big-name intellectuals like Sam Harris have built entire ecosystems on the idea that we can; thinkers like Barron or Peterson or Oxford mathematician John Lennox would say no—that even “science” is conducted from a prevailing notion about how the universe is arranged, otherwise we’d have no starting points from which to conduct our experiments and observations. So when it comes to articulating how and why we should live our lives, each of us is taking for granted some kind of worldview that has a definition and parameters—whether we realize it or not.
There’s no “science” conducted absent a worldview. Its very pursuit implies each scientist believes something about the world that enables its interrogation. I say all that to say it’s easy for me to assume that suffering is a necessary element of human life. It’s obvious to me we’ll have competing definitions of a term like “suffering.” In this case, consider suffering as at least the condition in which someone’s immediate future is demonstrably less ‘good’ than their immediate past or a notional longer-term future. It’s hard to pin down since “suffering” looks different across the world and people grow up with widely variable (and unpredictable) tolerances. “First World problems” is a meme with a message—that I routinely complain when the WiFi’s not working or when Starbucks gets my order wrong is proof we don’t all “suffer” the same, nor do we interpret hardship in the same way. But what matters more is that whether we think we’re suffering or not, we appreciate that it’s neither permanent nor useless. Fundamentally what bugs us or hurts us or outright traumatizes us has purpose. If they were random and we acted as though that were true, we wouldn’t then respond the way we do when ‘wronged’ by the world.
Nor Would We Go Looking for It, Would We?
That’s the other thing, which came to mind in the middle of that evergreen forest—while my ankles ached, arches flared, and shin bones threatened to poke through the skin. You might say to someone toeing the start line of a trail 30k at 8,000 feet—exercise is good for you or you got alone time or you’re chasing dopamine and the ‘high.’ If you met one of the crazies (I mean it in only the most endearing way possible 😁 ) doing the 50 or 100-miler, maybe you’d say the same after searching desperately for what ails them in the DSM. But if you’re participating in the event you’re at some point confronted with a suffering that comes from thinning air, a heinous uphill switchback, the threat of face-planting into a boulder, and realizing somewhere in mile 15 that you haven’t seen any pink-and-chrome! in God-knows-how-long…and with the reality that you asked for every bit of it.
Despite the name, we didn’t get to race through any part of the park—I’m sure the paperwork would be insane if there was even a chance to do it; still the adjacent national forest was more than decent consolation. As my wife worked through camping weekends more than six months ago, I was obsessed with adding on a trail race. Trail running’s a new norm for me; I’m getting sick of the abuse from a couple decades pounding the pavement. Living ten minutes from a well-sponsored trail network doesn’t hurt either.
The closer I got to race day, excitement turned to nerves. I woke up three or four times in the night and was wide-eyed when my 4:30am alarm went off. I sat in the dark of the trailer thinking today’s the day…that I earn my first DNF. 😒 Runners see “Did Not Finish” in their results when they can’t complete the course for whatever reason. I’m never chasing a time or racing anyone else when it comes to trail; and in fairness, I think about the potential for a DNF in almost every race—road and not. Fast-forward to 7am and the sunrise and mountain silhouette are enough to pull me into the depth’s of Creation without worrying how much it might hurt.
I knew it would hurt. At some point, and at multiple points throughout. I knew I’d struggle on the climbs and that my weak core might fail to right me if I hit a root or rock at a bad angle. And I knew I’d fail to prioritize training runs over work and feel that acutely when finding spots to stand aside as the stronger and faster blew past me. I knew all that and yet. I signed up enthusiastically and enjoyed even the toughest moments and asked my wife about doing it next year…even before we broke our camp and headed home. Why do we do this kind of stuff to ourselves?
I wasn’t alone on that course, so I really mean we—why do we ‘push’ ourselves and enter situations we know will be painful and hard and full of uphill battles (literally and otherwise)? Most of us haven’t escaped pain and struggle and battles on the homefront or in our professional lives. Afraid I was lost at one point I ran with a woman from Ohio whose husband was running his first ultra (the 60k). What’s he do for work? He’s a Columbus firefighter. A firefighter; in other words someone who likely doesn’t need proof of his own mettle. Yet he’s taken personal time off from a grueling job to run 36 miles at high altitude (where he lives sits at only a few hundred feet). Countless men and women, young and old, were breathing heavily and limping and coughing and clawing for water and salts at the aid stations. Folks ran into porta-potties just in the nick of time while others ripped off shirts and shoes to nurse wounds from grazing branches and their own body rubbing itself raw. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Unless there’s something about the difficulty of it all—the suffering involved—that we need. If there’s something fulfilling in all that hurt and uncertainty and challenge, then it makes sense that something inside us would look for chances to confront it. There’s nothing masochistic about ultrarunning or rock-climbing or any other extreme activity. It’s a wholly natural phenomenon (read: designed) that leads us to find something really hard in our experience, especially if we’re one of those blessed with a life that isn’t all that hard to begin with (like, nearly every American).
There’s Suffering and Then There’s Suffering…
Do not mistake me; I’m in no way comparing running a trail race or competing in extreme sports with the real suffering humans endure from poverty, illness, war, natural disaster, and any other calamity you can imagine. I’m just saying maybe some perspective-taking is in order. Next time you’re faced with something hard, before you discount it as meaningless or undeserved, consider what else in life has gone well. And consider whether your bout of “suffering” is akin to the kinds of suffering you can easily find in other parts of the world. What purpose might your hardship serve? What purposes have past hardships uncovered or yielded? Gratitude for what’s gone right is vital; appreciation for what’s gone wrong might be just as important to living a life that is not only full but plays out as it was intended.