The Witness of Suffering

Suffering is all around us, and often lurks under well-cloaked demeanor, clever disguise, and feigned interest in how our fellow human beings are really doing. As a compassionate witness, there is a duty to peel back these excuses, and engage people's true emotions in an ethical and loving way.

When I'm having a rough day, and people ask me how I'm doing, I have a range of choices in how to respond. If I'm in a hurry, or just don't want to get into things, I may just say "I'm fine" and let them off the hook in knowing that I'm not. I try to not do this often, because the truth is more often a downer that they don't know is coming, but I prefer to be truthful with my friends. The more I let people know that not all is well, the easier it is to gently describe a true reflection of my day without depressing everyone. The more in tune I've become to this, the more I realize others do it too, quite often. People put on the mask of "normal" and don't let others in, because the truthful conversation is just too hard to have some days.

Between our social culture of competitive displays of ideal living, constant social media input that only reflects the best of times and the excellent slivers of our days, we live under the impression that our "normal" state is quite worse than everyone else's, reinforcing our desire to put ourselves in a better light, whether it's truthful or not.

An antidote to this cultural sickness is to bear witness to the suffering of others. When we spend time with people who are facing real challenges, and do it with an honest intent to be with them, we find ourselves let into the secret of what they try to hide. We find ourselves seeing the human condition for what it really is, and not what we're assaulted with every day in the false signals of society. In doing so, we can see again how similar we are to each other and our divisions begin to fade and lose meaning. We become closer to seeing ourselves as brothers and sisters who have things in common that don't normally get shared, and this heals us in the process as well.


My next post will focus on the ethics of joy.