Pain is Inevitable, Suffering is Optional
The Buddhist Sutra, “The Arrow,” told in Shoes
First Arrow –the unavoidable pain of life.
A shoe is a shoe.
My shoe has a hole in it. A rock gets in and jabs the tender skin of my foot.
I feel it.
This is direct experience.
Second Arrow — the optional suffering.
There is a hole in my shoe and the way it’s now coming apart at the seams means I’ve never been good at walking. I don’t know how to keep things together. I never have. I’ve walked miles and miles and miles and have gotten nowhere, except to a worn out shoe.
I should never buy shoes again because I obviously don’t know how to walk right in them or this would’ve never happened. Or at the very least, I clearly chose the wrong shoes because I don’t make good choices and never have.
Everyone else has such good shoes. They’re always getting somewhere in theirs and they never have holes, unless they are designed to be there because they are fashionable shoes. I want fashionable shoes.
Why is it I can’t choose the right shoes that will take me somewhere? I’ve tried. I’m just going to give up walking altogether.
It’s not for me. I’m going to get a drink, then buy a hover-board.
This is suffering.
There is a sutra in Buddhism called “The Arrow.” It says that in life, two arrows strike us. The first arrow is the unavoidable pain of life. No one escapes being struck by this arrow. Even the most practiced, wise, enlightened, present and brilliant people feel the pain of life. It just comes with having a physical, impermanent human body living among other physical, impermanent bodies. But then, most of us are struck by the second arrow — the arrow of suffering.
The arrow of suffering is the story we tell about the pain of the first arrow. It’s the way our mind turns pain into ongoing story-thoughts that we are bad, not good enough, someone is to blame for our pain, life just isn’t fair, etc. It is also the source of obsession and distraction because we so want to escape the pain of the first arrow so we get really brilliant about creating elaborate stories to save us from our own pain. This one we can escape. It’s optional. In fact, it’s the only thing we ever really have any control over.
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