When Big Bad Things Happens

Shit happens to everybody. White people, black people, brown people, tall people, short people, fat people, and skinny people are all included. Basically, it works like this, if you’re alive on this planet, serious bad shit is going to happen to you.

The options are endless. You could be run over by a car. Yep, that’s a good possibility in some locations. You or someone you love could be attacked and killed by muggers. Now, with global climate change, there are more options for the fates to add to their arsenal. You could suffer heat stroke, get caught in a flood, or watch everything you care about burn up. Finally, no such post as this could be written without adding things like adding things like volcano eruptions, tornadoes, tsunamis, meteor impacts, etc. Go us humans.

Despite all the big bad nasty things we all will face during our short stint on this planet, there is a silver lining. For most of us, until we are set upon by an event that directly affects us, we remain emotionally distanced from what is happening to others.
Think about this totally make-believe conversation and you’ll get what I mean.

Me: Did you hear old Joe from down the street had a stroke?

You: Yeah , I heard. Too bad. Joe’s a nice guy.

Me: Hey, before I forget, if you’re going to the store, will you pick up a quart of milk?

You: Will do.

Both of us are aware that, Joe had a stroke, it’s news because Joe is our neighbor. It’s not happy news, but since neither of us is emotionally involved with Joe, there is no emotional attachment to the event that this big bad thing happened to Joe and his family.

Attachment is the key word here.

If we were wired to personally feel (be attached to) all the pain and suffering of others that we hear about, we would go nuts.(1) This is not to say we are all completely indifferent. Some big bad news motivates us to help in any way we can. We might join in a search party for a missing child. Maybe we donate money to help feed hungry children or communities struck by a natural disaster. That’s wonderful. Good for us. But we still don’t have an emotional attachment to these events. That is, until they happen to us. And, oh baby, they will.

There are two types of big bad things that will happen to us, the avoidable and the unavoidable. Avoidable events demonstrate our never-ending ability to make stupid mistakes, the unavoidable, well, shit just happens.

Avoidable events

Avoidable events happen when we do really stupid things that makes us a bull’s eye for mass ugliness in our lives. We build our house on a river delta that floods every few years or we build it at the base of an active volcano. We marry a man 25 years our senior and expect him to be the same when we are 50 and he’s 75. (It can work, but the odds are not in our favor). Poor choices are often the result of poor, incomplete, or false information. Others happen because our monkey brain takes control.

Advertisers are masters at luring us into unwise decisions by appealing to our monkey brains. We buy that new car or house that we can’t afford. We gleefully gather those credit cards that drive us to financial ruin.

Unavoidable events

Now we’ll take a gander at some of those unavoidable events. A loved one dies. You or someone you love becomes disabled. A “friend’ betrays you. A spouse cheats or decides to leave you. A forest fire relieves you of all your earthly belongings. Your boss lays you off. The apartment building where you live collapses. Some ass wipe drops a bomb on your neighborhood.

The philosophers tend to avoid discussions about those things that happen to us through no fault of our own. For instance, in the year my family was caught up in a hurricane while on a road trip it was unexpected and unwelcome. Same is true for the time we had a close call with a tornado. Also, we couldn’t do a damn thing about my granddad dying of tuberculosis. (Those were the good old days, just in case you’re thinking how wonderful things were way back then.)

Events like these can be emotionally and or physically extraordinarily difficult to cope with. In fact, some of us never learn to cope. I wish I could lay out a simple solution, but I can’t. However, folks far wiser than me have given us some clues as to how to handle events such as these.

Step One – Understand the Difference Between Pain and Suffering

The Buddha differentiated between pain and suffering. All of us have or will have pain. The degree of suffering we experience from that pain depends on how we react to the pain. That’s it in a nutshell. (2)

There are two types of pain: physical and emotional.

Physical pain begins very early in our lives. We fall and scrape our knee. We’re running barefoot on the beach and cut our foot on a chard of broken glass. We get the flu or pneumonia. Our bodies are wired to tell us when something is amiss and that’s a very good thing. We probably wouldn’t have made it as a species without these messages from our bodies.

Handling physical pain

If we separate the pain in our body, by being aware it is temporary and not really a part of who we are. It is an experience. If the pain is tolerable, that is fairly easy to do by using a few mental exercises. Just the simple act of awareness can work to significantly reduce physical pain. It works. Give it a try the next time you have a headache or eat something that disagrees with you. However, there are times when the pain is all encompassing. The pain moves in with neither our permission nor even a hint of paying rent. It takes over the house.

What’s interesting is that there are those people who have learned how to separate themselves from even this type of intense pain. They can undergo surgery and dentistry without the help of anesthetics. Who are these people? How do they accomplish that amazing feat? (3) And just so you know, I’m not one of those people. I’m fully into the whole anesthetic thing if I’m allowing a doctor to cut into my body or work on my teeth. However, I’m exploring this and as I understand more, I’ll share it with you.

Emotional pain

Emotional pain is the one that causes intense suffering. It’s easy to see why. Say someone we love dies. Their death can leave a hole in our hearts the size of the Grand Canyon. A fire burns down our uninsured house. Every material possession we own is gone along with many irreplaceable things like photographs of our family and friends. We are homeless and depressed.

Of course, both of the above events were inevitable losses, but we suffer the most by not preparing ourselves in advance for those inevitabilities. That’s why it’s so important to live in a state of awareness that everything is temporary. Absolutely everything. Our happiness and well-being depend on our ability to be fully aware of this fact. To do so will greatly reduce our suffering when big bad things happen to us.

The takeaway from this post:

Big bad things will happen to you.
Pain is inevitable, suffering is not.
The two types of pain are physical and emotional.
Physical pain is the body’s way of letting us know something is wrong.
It is possible to lessen or eliminate physical pain when it occurs.
Emotional pain is the root cause of suffering.
Awareness of the temporary nature of all things can reduce or eliminate suffering.