Find an easy answer so we can wrap this thing up fast

 The hard part about suffering is that it doesn’t have a pie chart.

There’s no clean way to accurately beak down the source, or sources, of our pain. It’s not thirty percent job stress, forty percent political climate and thirty percent ordinary depression.

Truth is, whatever stuff we’re going through is a complex convergence of multiple factors. Some of which we can see, some of which we can’t see; some of which we can control, some of which we can’t control.

And until we accept that, we will continue to ensnare our minds in the why of our suffering.

This is a fatal flaw of our culture. We live in a society of mastery and closure and problem solving and wanting things to be over, so we can just move on to the next thing. We demand to know why things are so fucked right now, or else.

But if there’s one lesson life seems to keep teaching me, it’s that there aren’t intellectual answers to suffering. Explanations might come later at the earliest, or they may never come at all.

Which is infuriating, but then again, trying to will answers into existence is a waste of the limited energy we have. Tracing the source of our pain like some computer glitch that we troubleshoot for twenty minutes is a distraction that steals us away from our current reality.

What we need to focus on is triaging. Stop the bleeding. Determine the severity of our condition and apply immediate care might to make the most positive difference as quick as possible.

The Dude, the grandmaster of zen, is someone who demonstrates an unwillingness to judge or jump to conclusions, and he is slow to arrive at any easy answers.

This is not a personality, it’s a practice. It’s something each of us can work on during our own moments of suffering. We can resist the intellectual low hanging fruit supplied by everything from our ego to our culture to mythology.

My favorite tool for of doing this is to recite an incantation in the form of a provoking question while drifting off to sleep:

I wonder what wants to be written?
I wonder what wants to be written?
I wonder what wants to be written?

It’s amazing what kinds of ideas are waiting for me upon waking. They don’t necessarily solve my problems, but they certainly add color to whatever is plaguing me in the moment.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Are you adventurous enough to commit to an uncertain outcome with an open heart and mind?