Buddha spoke about the nature of suffering in a teaching often referred to as, The Second Arrow:
“When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows; in the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental…”¹
As this teaching points out, we will inevitably experience injury as we walk through life, and as a result experience moments of pain (the first arrow). But it is the energy we expend resisting the nature of our injury that potentially causes even greater personal suffering (the second arrow).
Notice he never suggests we ignore our injury or pretend it doesn’t exist. No, if life flings an arrow and it lands on us, we should rightfully say, “Ouch.” That does not mean, however, that we should expend anymore of the remaining hours of our life complaining about the arrow in one exhausting form or another.
Past the point of initial impact, there is really nothing left to do but figure out how to safely remove the arrow, apply the appropriate treatment and allow the injury to heal. Could there be anything more practical than that?
We are all going to get hit with a few arrows over the course of living. Like death and taxes – pain is inevitable. But if we are mindful about it, we’ll expend our vital energy getting back to a state of homeostasis as efficiently as possible…and if we’re really on our game, we might try to discern some strategies for avoiding that particular type of arrow in the future.
¹ “Sallatha Sutta: The Arrow” (SN 36.6), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn36/sn36.006.than.html .