The Hard Part Is…

I am aware that there is suffering in this world. In fact, the four noble truths of the teachings of Buddha are (in my simple-minded explanation):

1.) There is suffering. It’s all suffering. The totality of life is suffering. Being born, living, wanting, craving, and dying are all suffering.

2.) The origin of suffering is our craving and lust for something “better” or “other”.

3.) The cessation of suffering comes as we accept the reality of the first two truths and reduce our cravings.

4.) There exists a path that we can take to eliminate our suffering, and it takes a shit-ton of practice.

The first time I read the Four Noble Truths, I was struck by a profound sense of “Well, fuck. That is a lot of suffering”.

There is that tricky-to-stick fourth noble truth, though, so there is a way out. For us, anyway. I have no difficulty keeping melancholy at bay when I see most human suffering, because I do believe that, like the second truth up there, most human suffering is the result of our overdeveloped ego, our lustfulness, or our simple “keeping up with the Jones’s” competitive natures (and a huge pile of FOMO creating ambitious experience-whores of us all).

Nope. For me, human nature and human suffering are deserving bedfellows.

Before you get too riled up: I am talking about adult human beings with enough free will to tie that spiritual noose around their own dissatisfied necks, not kids, and not the dispossessed or those unable to think and make free-will decisions of their own. The children and the dispossessed here in Sri Lanka are happy, healthy, well-fed, protected and productive. This is not about them.

Which brings me to my point (finally): For me, it is always so much more painful to watch an animal suffering. They do not have the free-will control systems and conscience that we are burdened with. Animals (and the dispossessed) are just the product of the purity of their nature, and because of this they experience suffering without understanding the causality behind it.

It is these guys.

They are the embodiment of the suffering that I find so hard to bear. They represent for me the idea that true, pure suffering exists in the world. They wake in me this deep and desperate desire to end (or at least reduce) their suffering. There are several paths we can take to do this, but all have limitations or impracticalities that generally end in me feeling the melancholy of my powerlessness to help.

We have taken on a project pup here at Surfpoint. She was brought in by the owner’s daughter from a remote kiteboarding area accessible only by boat, but needed to wait until we could provide them with medicine for the carpets of ticks and fleas covering them (they wouldn’t risk bringing them back otherwise).

These two, her siblings, did not survive the two days before they returned to bring them back, and unfortunately they were found dead on their return. No sign of the mother of these pups was ever seen, so we could not return the remaining pup to the proper care. The surviving sister has moved in with three other dogs here at Surfpoint, and she is improving a bit every day.

They named her Yoda. She is looking a little better today, and we hope that one day soon she will be grown, covered in fur, and strong enough to care for herself. I look at this as a success in many ways: She has learned kindness, she suffers less for this kindness, and I like to believe that she feels less physical pain (and itching).

There is a problem with this, though. We have spent a great deal of the desperately thin resources available on this island for this one pup. There are so many more animals on the island that need the same or greater care. We are limited to what we can provide for all of them, and I wonder how I can justify spending such a great deal of resource on just the one. There are several organizations working in Sri Lanka to sterilize street dogs, and to provide care and medications to feral dogs, cats, and wild donkeys, but they are fighting a double sided front as well: Limited resources, and a culture that has a caring ambivalence toward feral animals. The Sri Lankans are never abusive to these animals, and often you will see them feeding them scraps and giving them water, but they have a difficult enough time with their own subsistence that the end result is a guiltily shared burden of “looking out for number one”.

I know the concept of karma, and that we actually live all of these existences simultaneously, until we have gotten it all “right”, but it doesn’t make my heart hurt less when I see it. To the contrary, it is the innocence of the sufferer that is difficult to bear. Hell, I struggle with killing flies in my mosquito net at night (the mosquitos not as much, but flies are just doing fly stuff and being all innocent). I always feel guilty thinking about the fly in question, however annoying, doing fly things, then suddenly, smack! It never sits right with me, and ultimately leads to guilt and anxiety. And it is far, far harder as the suffering moves up what we consider the scale of sentience.

The path I struggle to walk is to keep this in check; to understand that suffering exists, to see it, while letting go of the concept that my attachment to the guilt of it is somehow my own karmic return.

For now, in all cases, if I am unable to do everything they may need, I will focus on what I can do: Offer a kindness, a pat on the head, or a small scrap of sustenance.

Sometimes, for a moment, all we need is a scratch behind the ears.