I was walking around my neighborhood on a cloudy day last week — something I try to do daily. On this particular day, the sun was nowhere to be found. Complete overcast as far as the eye could see.
But it’s interesting to remember that the sun is always shining.
Even on this overcast day. If one were to fly above the clouds, one would find the sun shining brightly. The same is even true at night. The sun is still shining. It is simply shining on the other side of the world.
In his short classic No Mud, No Lotus (a book we explored for Reading & the Good Life), the late Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh explained,
One of the most difficult things for us to accept is that there is no realm where there’s only happiness and there’s no suffering. This doesn’t mean that we should despair. Suffering can be transformed. As soon as we open our mouth to say “suffering,” we know that the opposite of suffering is already there as well. Where there is suffering, there is happiness.
But, when we experience suffering — it is incredibly challenging to see the availability of anything else. Similar to that overcast day (or night), one cannot see (or remember that) the sun shining brightly. But the sun is always shining.
The Buddhist teacher and nun Pema Chodron writes in Welcoming the Unwelcome that the Buddha’s main concern was always to help people become free of suffering. “With the understanding that our suffering originates from confusion in our mind, his objective was to help us wake up from that confused state. He, therefore, encouraged or discouraged certain forms of behavior based on whether they promoted or hindered that process of awakening.”
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