Affliction

When you are sick or in pain, laid up or infirmed, there is a disconnect that occurs between you and the larger world. The bustling activity outside your window, the mailman making his rounds, the kids racing down the block, the joggers and dog walkers, they all seem to operate in a parallel universe. You envy them, and long to live once more in their world.

Then one day, when your good health returns, you merge again with that other world and the suffering you knew begins to slowly fade from memory until it soon seems but a bad dream.

What you can be left thinking about, however, are those who never leave that bad dream, those who  are chronically ill.

Many in this world must feel the disconnect with the larger world 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They do not see themselves represented out their window, or in magazines, or on television. They don't see many others in their condition. They must feel isolated and marginalized.

Thinking about them I realize the only value I've ever found in human suffering is the way it awakens us all to what so many people on this earth deal with on a daily basis, and the way that awakening gives birth to empathy.

Empathy humanizes us, suffering humbles us. Nothing else does the job as well, nor as completely.

Nevertheless, I would prefer a world without suffering. I would hope to gain understanding in other ways. I don't wish suffering on even the most heinous among us. I see it as a sad addition to existence that just so happens to offer occasional gifts with its routine, uninvited appearances.

It has been said that explaining human suffering is the most formidable task the religions of the world are called upon to tackle. It is what most haunts followers who yearn to believe in a loving God.

I don't expect an adequate explanation for human suffering will ever come along, only continued attempts by earnest souls who wish to fit the pieces together into a unified whole.

But I will always admire those out there who suffer, day in and day out, with no divine explanation for their struggles, who manage, on their own, to pull their private meaning from that strife, to make their own peace with it, and to rise above it with a sublime and simple human dignity.

They are my heroes.