Suffering is not a shaded moment in life; for creatures, it is what life is. There is not also pleasure, as some foundational contrast, but the reprieve from the innate, as is an uptake from waterboarding. Nature’s cell is built with exquisite machinery of torture.
Take the inherent parameters of creatureliness: gravity, digestion, combustion, climate, the razor-thin margin of atmosphere—a concoction as delicate as it is rare. One would not say these elements are horrifying because they are what we first learn to tolerate. The whaling infant hardens to the furious child. It is only new pain—which careens unpredictably through our paths from fate’s toy box—that we surmise as suffering because we haven’t developed their specific calluses. Novel pain is nothing more than added weight to the overloaded. We are literally sculpted by trauma, body, mind, and spirit, and tempered by calluses.
The biomechanical jihad for creatures, especially the psychic, is to adapt to ailment and loss. Not to curse it for happening. That presumes undue grace of the Universe. Our very nucleic acid is caustic. The tinnitus of our lives is a primordial bellow etching the world with every twitch of our muscles. Especially those that claw for anesthesia, hypnotics, or a way out. Yet there is no escape. Only eternal return.
But we are born heroes. Not for the delicacies we invent and on which we imbibe despite our torture. When we fight the crushing pull of the Earth we call it “standing”.