I woke up this morning thinking about suffering. Partly because I am reading This Is Not The Story You Think It Is: A Season of Unlikely Happiness by Laura Munson. She gave up Suffering period, full stop, end of story and partly from following my thoughts.

How did you sleep? My husband asks . . .

I reply “HORRIBLE!”

I ask, “how about you?”

He says, “okay, I kept waking up all night but I fell back to sleep every time.” I thought that describes my night . . . so did I also sleep ok? If horrible is my first thought in the morning is that what keeps me rooted in not enough, does it keep me shackled and in bondage to scarcity? My mind continues. . .

“I didn’t like this about yesterday”

“That person disrespected me”

“That organization didn’t send me a thank-you note”

“I didn’t hear about a writing I submitted for publication”

My mind starts to swing wildly now

“It sucked and they don’t want to tell me”

They were quite crazed maybe your writing wasn’t on the top of their mind

“Ok, yes. That is true, we are all busy . . . it has nothing to do with me”

“It sucked”

“I should write something else – better yet I should never write again. . .”

My mind continues:

Back and forth

Black and white

Monkey and still

Loving and loathing

Then it dawns on me

I cause my own suffering through random acts of violence.

All these digs into myself

declarations of helplessness

victimization

incompetence

No matter how fleeting

Make me a terrorist

I don’t know when I will hit

I don’t know how long my reign will last

All I know is I have not declared peace

So the violence continues

Should I seek a truce?

Maybe declaring peace isn’t my next step

Maybe what I need is to choose

To declare choice

To love you as my neighbor or not

To share my gifts and resources or not

To live in a paradigm of sufficiency or not

To suffer or not

Through choice

I have the freedom to choose every moment, every day, every move

If I do, then maybe we all do

Congress chooses ego first constituents second they could choose cooperation or collaboration but so far I haven’t seen it

Americans choose classification first (race, gender, class, education) and community second. We could choose differently, we have the choice to weave and strengthen our social fabric

Al-Qaeda chooses destruction of American ideals through violence, they could choose sharing of Islamic values through education

Our monetary system chooses concentration and hoarding as declarations of success, we could choose dissolution and elimination

Yes, money is a choice

Isolation is a choice

Suffering is a choice

What will we choose today, tomorrow, next week, next month?

Personally I choose to hang up my terrorist weapons and see what emerges.