What Is Suffering?

I was sitting on a dock overlooking the Sheepscot River with Jonathan having a conversation about all things love and fear. We started talking about suffering. I asked him a question I’d been carrying for a while.

“How do you define suffering?”

Jonathan is the father of a good friend of mine going back to high school. He spent years as a minister at St. Paul’s Church in Brunswick, Maine. He’s thought about hard things for a living. So, I figured he’d have an answer ready.

He didn’t. He said it was a good question, and that he’d never really thought about how to put it into words.

Then he tried anyway.

Off the top of his head, he said, “Suffering is physical, emotional, or relational pain that pulls you out of the present.”

He told me not to quote him on that. Then he said I could. He just reserved the right to change his mind later. I liked that. The honesty of working something out in real time, instead of reaching for a tidy answer.

I’ve been sitting with suffering for a while now. Of all the spiritual traditions I’ve read about, Buddhism is the one that resonates with me most. It doesn’t try to make suffering disappear. It starts by acknowledging that we all suffer. Christianity, at least the way I’ve understood it, has leaned more toward relieving suffering. Toward fixing it. Buddhism just says suffering is part of being alive.

But here’s where I get stuck.

I have a hard time claiming suffering as my own.

I’m a tall white man born in the United States. I wasn’t born into a lot of money, but we had what we needed and most of what we wanted. Today I’d be considered wealthy. I live in a position of real privilege.

So, when I think about suffering, I think about everyone else’s. I see so much of it outside of me. People carrying weights I’ve never had to carry. Next to that, my life looks easy. I’ve had hardships, sure. But suffering? That word always felt too big for me to claim.

I said as much to Jonathan. I told him I didn’t think I’d really suffered much.

He didn’t let me off the hook.

He asked if I was actually addressing the suffering I did have. Not measuring it against anyone else’s. Just looking at it honestly.

And then we went somewhere I didn’t expect.

For about forty years of my life, I kept parts of myself hidden. I pushed them down. The sensitive side of me. The part that cries at sad songs and cries at happy songs too. I feel things deeply. For a long time, I was ashamed of that, because I’m a guy. And guys aren’t supposed to be soft. So, I kept many parts of me boxed up.

I’m only now learning to see that sensitivity as a kind of superpower. The range I can feel is enormous. The joy is huge. So is the sorrow. Feeling everything that deeply is a gift. It can also be hard to carry.

Jonathan looked at that and named it for what it was.

Living forty years with parts of yourself put away, he said, that’s suffering too.

I sat with that one.

And I think he’s right.

And maybe that is part of what suffering is. It’s any way you’re kept from showing up as your whole self. Through a relationship. Through what the world expects. Through a story you’ve been told about who you’re allowed to be.

The definition he gave me at the start reads differently now. Pain that pulls you out of the present. Hiding does exactly that. You can’t be fully here when half of you is locked away.

I’ve been working on a children’s book lately. I didn’t plan it this way, but it keeps circling the same thing. What it costs to leave parts of yourself behind.

Maybe that’s the work. Not getting rid of the suffering. Just stopping the hiding. Letting the parts we’ve put away come back out into the light.

That’s what I am thinking. And like Jonathan, I reserve the right to change my mind.

---

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.