Why suffering?
Suffering exists for a simple and beautiful reason: to teach us how to not suffer — to as much as is possible, not make suffering necessary to existence. It’s as if reality prefers that we not suffer and instead learn the ways of enjoyment, harmony, serenity, and such.
Suffering is a painful condition where the circumstances of the moment are informing us This pain exists because you haven’t recognized the factors that result in this particular suffering. Identify these factors and address them such that this pain need not continue or come about again. If we don’t want to suffer, it’s up to us to be good scholars of suffering’s latency, and conduct ourselves such that its furtherance isn’t necessary.
Exactly as we misapprehend or ignore suffering’s myriad forms, so must it press its need to exist. Or as we forget lessons learned, so must it revive. And particularly as we use our mind to insist that it has no right to exist, suffering is compelled to make consciousness itself painful — malcontent schooling us on the consequence of an unenlightened attitude toward suffering.
We take suffering so personally, yet it’s common to us all. As the factors by which suffering arises are universal, with our efforts to alleviate only personal suffering, ignoring the suffering of others, it will remain in the world — teaching us that we must be good teachers ourselves, sharing our hard earned wisdom of suffering’s potentials and remedies with each other so that we all might be less at risk.
So yes suffering is intrinsic to existence, and it’s only latent suffering that we can truly alleviate, and best collectively. Yet why wouldn’t we earnestly work to alleviate future suffering not just for ourselves but also those inheriting the world from us? We’ve certainly benefited from the efforts by those that suffered before us to understand and address its causation, and would have appreciated more effort by those that couldn’t be bothered. Let’s be hereafter appreciated by our better, less prone to suffering, selves.
Going forward we’d do well to give suffering more care and respect — be thankful for its intelligence and grace, and quit unmindfully coercing it into a world in which it would rather not belong. We should listen to suffering as it insists that we go without it in the embodiment of love.