Since COVID, it’s clearer than ever that illness is a lot stranger than we might think. Illness isn’t just a matter of catching a bug or being a victim of a pandemic or exposure to environmental pests or pollution, or of aging⎼ although pandemics, bugs, aging, and the environment are certainly involved. So much seems to be involved.
When I was in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, West Africa, I caught a bug, or a few bugs of different kinds. And when I became ill and had to leave the village and country where I lived, I found out the people I left behind felt responsible for my illness. Not that they thought they should have taken better care of me. They believed someone in the village had caused me to get sick. For them, the germ of all illness was bad thoughts and intentions spread from one villager to another.
And in the U. S. many feel illness is a sign of weakness; that we or the sick person is somehow deficient, not strong enough to fight it. At work, we might denigrate someone who stays home to treat an illness ⎼ or we used to before COVID. Now, we hopefully just wish them to get well.
Ill can have several meanings and connotations, most are relative or comparative. To be ill is to be in an abnormal, unfavorable, undesirable state, and that we’re hurting, threatened, suffering, or have some defined condition called a disease.
In Buddhism, the word for suffering is Dukkha, although the translation is debated. Zen teacher Steve Hagen, in his wonderful book Buddhism Plain and Simple: The Practice of Being Aware, Right Now, Every Day, says Dukkha is in opposition to Sukkha, or satisfaction, so instead of suffering we get unsatisfactory. But more accurately, he says, imagine a bicycle wheel out of kilter. Every time the wheel spins around to the “off” spot, there’s a bounce or wobble that’s bothersome, produces pain, and makes us unhappy. Suffering is being out of kilter. Another Zen teacher, David Loy, analyzes suffering as the sense of something missing, lacking, in ourselves, in life.
We can see suffering all around us. In Buddhism, the first of the four noble truths Buddha realized in his enlightenment was Dukkha, recognizing suffering, being out of kilter is just part of life. The other three are that there’s a cause of suffering, a way to let go of or cease suffering, and a path to that cessation. So, is all life tied to illness? Is suffering the same as illness? Or a response to it?
Part of me says, “you know what it is to be ill.” But do I? I know when I hurt and something in my body is off. But when I try to define illness, I can get lost in the complexity. And sometimes I am ill or in pain, but I’m not suffering. The pain sort of reassures me I’m alive.
There are conspiracy theories, exaggerations, lies about illness, especially the pandemic⎼ but there’s also science. The mind and body, despite having separate labels are never separate; they are two words for ways to view one reality. When we feel powerless, or depressed emotionally, for example, we’re depressed physically. Likewise, when we do things like mindfulness meditation, we improve immune response, digestion, heart rate, etc. and the breadth of our awareness. We don’t suffer as much, depending not on what’s happening but on our response to it.
Obviously, what we eat, our lifestyle can help or hurt our health. Most heart attacks happen on Mondays, for example, possibly due to the stress of beginning a new work week. Our attitude toward an illness, taking it as another experience to learn from ⎼ or visualizing being healthy, or blood cells fighting a disease ⎼ might help us recover from one.
If we are subjected to pollution our health can be undermined. Whereas, good friends, experiencing awe viewing a sunrise, a waterfall, or art can promote health and happiness.
The more compassionate the community we live in, the greater chance of being at ease and healthy. Protecting the health of our neighbors makes our own health more assured. There will be less of a chance of someone spreading a disease and more of a chance of noticing and responding to a problem as soon as it appears. This is one reason good and universal healthcare helps all of us.
Likewise, the more violent, chaotic, oppressive a community is, the more it sickens us. The political-economic-social “climate” as well as the state of the world or a climate emergency, can make us sick. The more fearful or unhealthy we are, the easier it is to manipulate us.
So, we might hide from or distort illness because when we’re sick, we feel everything changing quickly and unpleasantly. We might fear what the symptoms mean. Our ordinary, normal life is stopped. We might concentrate less on planning the future, more on right now. Illness slows us down but also reminds us of our vulnerability.
And it reminds us of death. It reminds us of our being here only temporarily. Maybe this is why some of us not only hide illness from others but hide our responsibility for others from ourselves; we don’t want to think about our own vulnerability, or our own death.
But this could also wake us up. Feeling our vulnerability can shake us or wake us to the truth of our interdependence with everyone else.
Sometimes, when ill, we get more attention, and realize people care for us. We should mourn those we’ve lost, but also, as we age, mourn the loss of the assumption we have ages of time ahead. We can acknowledge, mindfully, that we don’t know we have any time other than now.
Illness is strange because it’s not one thing but tied to so much, maybe everything. Realizing this can help us suffer less from the pain and discomfort. When we can let ourselves be aware of what we’re feeling and what we face in the moment, we can research and get treatment from recognized health professionals and support from our community. Action promotes wellness.
As Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and activist Thich Nhat Hanh said, we all “inter-are.” Everything we do, feel, think, every illness we go through, is not just ours but, in some often-unseen way, everyone’s. Illness and suffering are two things we all share.
Hindus and Buddhists use the image of Indra’s Net to better understand our mutual interconnection with all living beings and the earth itself. Indra is an ancient Indo-European and Hindu god of sky, lightning, weather, thunder, storms, rains, and war. He defeats Vritra, the great deceiver and evil, and thus allows prosperity and happiness to flourish.
In the classic book, The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra, there’s a wonderful description of Indra’s Net by linguist Sir Charles Eliot. Imagine a network “of pearls so arranged that if you look at one you see all the others reflected in it. In the same way each object in the world is not merely itself but involves every other object and in fact IS everything else.” Illness can have physical causes. But maybe the heart of suffering is feeling separate from the net, and optimal health is feeling engaged with something or linked to everything.
So, instead of meaning we’re deficient or at fault for being ill, it means we must be kind and aware of how we treat ourselves. Our awareness of our body and mind, and the kindness we give ourselves, becomes the kindness and awareness we carry into every interaction.
This is an ancient teaching, not much different from the Golden Rule. Acting to make the political, social, and economic system more compassionate is acting to make us all healthier. What a strange thing is illness. It would be wonderful for me, for all of us today to feel and act with this realization.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock