Suffering is there because it's part of the world in which there is pain receptors and a brain to have mental distress. That's it.Beastro wrote: ↑Wed May 18, 2022 4:46 amWhy is suffering a sensation in our lives? What is it there for us to feel it? Same as pain.
It is certainly not a happy thing, that isn't its place in our lives.
My grandmother had six.That woman who had five still births? Such a great lesson.
My mother had a stroke two years ago. I found her on the floor of the her living room having laid there for three days. She survived and is now in a care home because she's paralyzed on her right side and constantly gets nerve pain in the right arm due to its inactivity.That person whose body is slowly turning to bone? Such a great suffering to behold. Sure that person enjoys that.
My house got renovated at 11 and black mold was ripped out. I health never fully recovered and I began to miss enough school that places kept asking me to leave despite my above average grades, even continuing education.All those childhood diseases, cancers, or birth defects? Great lessons for the parents.
On top of that I lived in a house with active emotional and verbal abuse from my father as well as neglect when my mom broke down herself mentally and became emotionally unavailable having given up on life.
I have had decades of life taken from me and still endure pain every day of my life with what I'm still dealing with.
But at the very least, I can understand what others are going through enough to know that I don't understand their unique hell. I certainly will never say as has been said to me to just snap out of all of this or that the reasons for what they're dealing with are excuses and the details behind them are bullshit.
That intimate understanding helps. My mother lived with what neurologist called "one giant headache her entire life", something our neighbour couldn't understand because he'd never had a headache in his entire life and concluded that she was just making them up in her mind, that she should just not think of the headaches anymore and they'd vanish. He had no idea what the hell he was talking about because he'd never suffered one himself.
And this is just one aspect of suffering that brings good into our lives. I could go into others, like the year I lived on barely anything and lost 110 lbs, yet, the major thing I can remember are the small moments of enjoyment carved out from that hellish year and what that time built in me overcoming it that helped me so much.
But even then, I still understand the bitterness in your post as it is the human position we naturally take just as we hate pain even if it keeps us from worse cuts and breaks (And DON'T get me started on chronic pain. You do not want to get into a comparing contest with me about THAT!).
Humans are capable of using that suffering to maybe learn from it.
Whst you have been talking about is empathy. You don't even need to suffer to understand those in suffering.
When people talk about suffering in a negative way its usually in connection with some religious aspect to it.
Why would a just God have a mother lose her child to some horrible childhood cancer to just teach her a lesson?
The usual explanation is that this is just world we live in and there is no higher reasoning behind anything. Someone suffers, the rest of the world moves on.
