Making Use of Discomfort

A friend recently accused me of being relentlessly positive. I was slightly insulted. The teaching that the good life is simply a matter of thinking good thoughts and taking a positive perspective is pernicious, false and misleading. My lived experience corresponds much more closely to the Buddha’s first teaching: Discomfort and suffering are unavoidable parts of human life. And so far, as I have asked this inquired of hundred of clients, students and friends, everyone has reported a similar experience. No one has a life free from upset and anguish. (In the Christian narrative as well, Christ does not avoid our full human life but dies suffering on a cross – an image that, though disturbing and challenging to deal with, also aligns with the truth of my experience at times.)

In Buddhism, this teaching of the inescapability of suffering, is known as the First Noble Truth. It is not the first inconvenient or the first terrible fact of life. It is noble: something of value, something precious. And if our discomfort and suffering are precious, most of us are already quite wealthy.

As I was processing the accusation of relentless positivity, I began to see that it may come from this particularly Buddhist relationship to the inherent difficulty of being human. When we accept that discomfort is part of life, we can move away from our cultural affliction of fixing or denying whatever is unpleasant. When our negative experiences are accepted as part of our life, we can stop fighting and judging and running away. We can begin to be present with what is actually present in the moment. When we are present with what is right here, some new possibility appears.

This teaching of the possibility of suffering is not something you should accept. In fact it has very little value as something to just believe and talk about. The invitation here is to consider that this might actually be true and to look more deeply into your own experience to find out for yourself.

We could even practice right now with the anxiety and fear that some of us are feeling as we live into the rising tide of Covid-19 infections. Many of us are now staying at home with minimal physical contact with the outside world and a daily deluge of scary information about the pandemic.  We have to deal with our partners, our pets, our children, the blank walls and most especially ourselves in new ways. Everyone, especially ourselves, can get on our nerves.

What if we didn’t have to fix or even intellectually understand our discomfort? What if our anxiety and irritation and fear are natural and just one part of being human? What if the experience of this moment, whatever its content, is actually an opportunity to learn something new? To become more fully human? To be more fully alive?

I guess my friend was right. This teaching of the possibility of discomfort and suffering is a kind of positivity—relentless because it includes whatever is here, even the negativity.