Imagine for a second, you’re in a bar somewhere, a club, a party, any form of social event really. You’re standing against a wall, or sitting down, you’re looking generally bored when someone walks up to you. They begin to strike up a conversation and you suddenly find yourself somewhat interested--you begin discussing each other's lives, small talk at first but then it diverts into more serious matters as you begin to go over each other's history. Then, there’s the moment, the moment that happens in most interpersonal conversations of substantial length, one of you brings up a traumatic experience. It’s unimportant how the conversation continues after that point, the focal issue here is the ubiquity of the traumatic experience. The notion of suffering that you or your companion have just mentioned, invoking the universal humanitarian truth that we have all suffered.
Everyone, at some point in their lives has gone through some sort of pain, some sort of anguish, be it heartbreak or death, it doesn’t matter, it’s happened to all of us. Seven billion people on this planet of ours and for each one of them, there manages to be some sort of suffering some sort of sorrow or anxiety. No one is safe from suffering, no one goes through life without it. Everyone is challenged in some way or another, and everyone has problems. No one person's pain is greater than another and to think so is fallacious; suffering is suffering, suffering is human.
If you live a life that acknowledges the universal truth of suffering than you will come to realize that everyone who goes through it deserves the benefit of the doubt. They bear a burden, as do you, and their actions should be weighed in accordance with the load they are carrying. Therefore, humanity should treat each other with the knowledge that we all are carrying a load of pain and suffering, and in that way perhaps we can begin to see the illumination of kindness. It is said that pain and grief never change, people just learn how to carry the load. If we can gaze upon the suffering that each of us has endured, and we comprehend the suffering that our fellow man has endured than together we can help shoulder each other’s burdens.
I have heard it said that death is the great equalizer, that all are brought to the same position at the tick of the final hour. It is not death but rather suffering that is the great equalizer. Unlike death, suffering happens to each of us, for a longer period of time than the death of our bodies--the death of our bodies is over in an instant. Suffering can carry on for decades. Suffering is pain that we all share, it is the notion of trauma that unites all of us, rich or poor, old or young, we are all subject to some sort of pain at some time in our lives. It is this pain that can unite us, when we can recognize that the people we know are going through pain just as we are and perhaps we can forgive them for it when they err under this heavy burden. If we can accomplish this, then the universal misery which loves universal company can instead be thought not as a negative, but rather, as unifying.
