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.