Suffering V Pain

Suffer: To feel pain; to undergo hardship.

I was listening to a guided meditation tape where the leader asked me to imagine four individuals: myself; someone I love; someone I see regularly but don't know personally; someone that I really, really . . . would rather go stand somewhere else.  Then repeat these simple statements: "May you be happy.  May you be healthy and well.  May you be free from mental and physical suffering.  May you live without fear and experience peace in all ways."

One time Little Westside Jonny and I were sitting in a canoe on a brackish lake in the jungle - deep in the jungle - on the Colombian/Ecuadorian border.  We were drifting by a small island covered with dense jungle shit.  LWSJ began speculating on how much money someone would have to pay him to spend a night on the island.  I got it down to fifty thousand dollars - for fifty large I could hack it.  I was trying to explain how I would hack out a little clearing and stomp around, shouting, causing a ruckus, scaring off whatever the hell would be living on the island.  Or I would climb up into a tree and sit there, safe.  This was before the guide handed me a pair of binoculars so that I could see a snake the size of a Buick curled up in the nook of a similar tree. I digress.

He waved his hand as If I was a gnat he was trying to shoo away.  Not happening.  He firmly stated: "There is no amount of money on this planet that would convince me to stay there, by myself, in the dark."

"You don't think you could handle the physical pain for one night?" I asked. 

"It's not the physical pain I'm worried about," he said.  "They'd have to lock me up in a padded room when they took me off there."

Physical suffering versus mental suffering.  I get that.  If I had to choose between a repeat of a physician digging around in my legs with a large needle or some of the weird mental obsessions that get lodged in my head . . .