“Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.” – Harold S. Kushner.
“Consolation is what we do, or try to do, when we share each other’s suffering or seek to bear our own. What we are searching for is how to go on, how to keep going, how to recover the belief that life is worth living.” – Michael Ignatieff.
Suffering
We all have experienced suffering one way or the other in our lifetime. The main difference is how we respond to it. There’s a well-known phrase that tells us that suffering happens for a reason. But when the innocent children of Ukraine were killed by the Russian bombs, it is hard to justify the ensuing suffering of their parents and relatives that it is meant to be for a reason. There are indeed absolute sufferings that no words or reason can erase the deep grief and pain. They are called unchosen sufferings. Nobody wants them but they happen anyway as part of our living experience. They don’t enrich our lives nor do they make us better people. And we have to deal with them in our own way. There is no special grace.
Aside from therapy and counselling, the cheapest and most accessible way of dealing with grief is to read books on the subject of suffering. One of them is Paul Bloom’s The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning (2021).
Upon reading the title of the book, one can be taken aback and say, “Is this guy for real?” because when can suffering be pleasurable. But that’s precisely what Bloom’s argument in the book. “Under the right circumstances and in the right doses,” he wrote, “physical pain and emotional pain, difficulty and failure and loss, are exactly what we are looking for.” So not only is suffering a “sweet spot”, we are also choosing to experience it. I wanted to stop reading it right there, but then he gave several examples: (1) going to movies that make us cry, or scream, or gag; (2) listening to sad songs; (3) poking at sores; (4) eating spicy foods; (5) immersing in painfully hot baths; (6) climbing mountains; (7) running marathons; (8) getting punched in the face in gyms and dojos; (9) volunteering to go to war for the challenge, fear and struggle and; (10) having children. Hmm, his examples make sense. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. I continued reading.
He wrote the “book defends three related ideas. First, certain types of chosen suffering – including those that involve pain, fear, and sadness – can be sources of pleasure. Second, a life well lived is more than a life of pleasure, it involves, among other things, moral goodness and meaningful pursuits. And third, some forms of suffering, involving struggle and difficulty, are essential parts of achieving these higher goals, and for living a complete and fulfilling life.”
As hinted in the preceding paragraph, there are two categories of chosen suffering. The first category of suffering aims at pleasure. His examples are “spicy food, hot baths, frightening movies, rough sex, intense exercise, and the like.” He lists the benefits of this kind of suffering as: (1) increase the joy of future experiences, (2) provide an escape from consciousness, (3) satisfy curiosity, and (4) enhance social status. The second is to have a meaningful life like climbing mountains or having children. It requires more effort and can be unpleasant but it can bring about a life well lived. The end goals of these two sorts of suffering are experienced happiness and overall satisfaction in life. What drives us to reach them is money, of course, which gives truthiness to the famous saying that “money can buy you happiness.” Money, though, has diminishing returns on experienced happiness but has no threshold on satisfaction — the more money, the better. That last point answers my puzzlement as to why senior people want more money by spending their pensions in lotteries and casinos. The other take away I learn from the book is the metric for satisfaction called the Cantril Self-Anchoring Scale involving a ladder from 0 to 10 where you mark down where you are: 0 means “the worst possible life for you” and 10 is “the best possible life for you.”
We have many reasons why we do things including choosing to suffer. Paul Bloom’s book gives us insights and explanations that chosen suffering “can lead to great pleasure; and it is an essential part of experiences that we deem to be meaningful. It can connect us to others and can be a source of community and love. It reflects deep sentiments of the mind and feelings of the heart.”
Consolation
Whenever there’s grief, consolation is just around the corner. But how to console others is the question. Words don’t come easily, and if they do, they may sound unnatural or condescending. Being there as a silent comforter is better, especially if they are inconsolable. It used to be that religion had the strong currency because it offered a hope – that of paradise where families would be together eternally. But nowadays, afterlife seems to be just an illusion. Paradise is here on earth. “The meaning of life,” according to Michael Ignatieff in his most recent book, On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times (2021), “was not to be found in the promise of paradise, not in the mastery of the appetites, but in living to the full every day. To be consoled, simply, was to hold on to one’s love of life as it is, here and now.”
Hope remains an essential ingredient of consolation but no longer God’s gift. It offers us the strength to move on, to find solace during moment of loss and suffering. It also tells us there’s a limit to everything, to accept what life has to offer including injustices and reversals of fortunes. “To be consoled,” Ignatieff writes, “is to make peace with the order of the world without renouncing our hopes for justice.”
It sounds defeatist but it’s not. Consolation is reconciliation not resignation. “To be resigned to life,” Ignatieff says, “is to give up, to forgo any hope that it could be different. To be reconciled to life, on the other hand, allows us to hold out hope for what the future might bring. To be reconciled we must first make peace with our losses, defeats, and failures. To be consoled is to accept these losses, to accept what they have done to us and to believe, despite everything, that they need not haunt our future or blight our remaining possibilities.”
In his book, Ignatieff portrays a collection of historical persona who experienced severe losses in their lives yet managed to overcome them: Job, the psalmists, St. Paul, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Boethius, Dante, Count of Orgaz, Michel de Montaigne, David Hume, Condorcet, Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln, Gustav Mahler, Max Weber, Anna Akhmatova, Primo Levi, Miklós Radnóti, Albert Camus, Václav Havel, and Cicely Saunders.
I like to highlight two characters in the book that interest me most. First is the story of Job. Job is a strong believer of God. At the behest of Satan, God reverses all Job’s fortunes to test his faith. Job cries for a reason and demands a hearing from God which is getting close to a blasphemy. God is not having any of it and finds Job to be arrogant. God speaks in a whirlwind and tells Job that he is nobody who can just question His authority and the Creator of Earth and its wonders. God insists absolute obedience and total silence from His creatures in the face of evil and suffering. True to his nature, Job must reconcile (not resign) with God’s power although he might never understand why things still go wrong when you have strong faith. After that acceptance, God restores Job’s former life.
The happy ending in the story of Job still does not satisfy the question: why still suffer when you do everything right and have faith? Ignatieff’s take is that by Job’s refusal to admit guilt and insistence that God recognizes his innocence, “he kept faith, paradoxically, by demanding justice.
To demand justice is to have faith that the world is sufficiently meaningful for justice to be possible and that God has the power to grant it. If this interpretation is correct, the teller of the Job story wants us to understand that if there is consolation in obedience, there is none in helpless resignation. If we apply this idea to our own lives, consolation can lift us from the depths of despair only if we have the courage to demand recognition, from ourselves and from others, for the reality of our suffering and refuse the false consolations of those who deny what we have endured or who claim that it is justified. The story also counsels us to stop asking the question that so often torments us in grief: Why me? God tells Job, and thus tells us, this is a question for which there is no good answer.”
Next is the chapter on Cicely Saunders because it deals with the subject of dying. Is there a good death? Apparently yes and that’s how Cicely Saunders aims her life to achieving not for herself but for others. As a nurse and a doctor, Saunders encounters “the indignities of unintended pain and the loneliness of final illness.” She knows that small gestures of kindness, such as tucking-in the patients at night, can make much difference to a dying person. She says that “dying patients usually like to be propped up a little or to be on their sides. They only remain flat on their backs because they cannot move or ask. They need pillows so arranged that their heads do not fall forwards. They are often frightened in the dark and long for light and fresh air. They get little comfort from oxygen and hate a mask. Their tossings are often attempts to throw off the bedclothes which must be light.” She is a well-known advocate of palliative care.
Even the great ones suffered; there was no special protection for them. Reading their experiences is in itself a consolation, so is writing the book as Ignatieff’s way of finding solace in his loss— his public humiliation in 2011 federal election when the Liberal Party lost big time, including his own seat. Ignatieff writes, “Writing it was a reckoning with my losses, in the company of these living presences who, in their writing, shared with me the hours of trial in which they tried to find a pathway to hope. The consolation they offer, it seems to me, lies in their example, in their courage and lucidity, and in their determination to leave something behind that might console us…Their company restored to me a sense of the unbroken continuity, and the occasional grandeur, of the human experience. Thanks to their example, I learned we are never alone when we face pain and loss. There is always someone who has been there before, who can share the experience. That, I hope, will be as consoling to you as it has been to me.”
24 July 2024