Why Suffering (For Others) Leads To Meaning

Comanches. Compassion. And a third path.

Writer. Navy SEAL. Dispatches on ancient meaning for the modern world through combat, anthropology, dreams, nature, training, figs, and dogs.

The Tower of Babel. Tobias Verhaecht.

Modern compassion is defined as the desire to relieve the suffering of others. In the past, however, it meant something very different. It comes from com and pati, which means to suffer with.

My hunch is both definitions are wrong. We are fighting a two front war: on the one hand, we have a modern compassion that is cruel in its caring, and on the other hand an ancient compassion that is caring in its cruelty. Therefore we need an updated version of compassion. One that transcends both the ancient life-by-pain and the modern death-by-love. One that leads to greater aliveness, meaning, and purpose.

Let us define this new compassion as suffering for.

So why does it matter?

It helps to compare it to modern compassion. We can see good intentions everywhere at present: giving needles to addicts, not telling the obese on deaths door they are in mortal danger, letting repeat felons go without trial, and giving A’s in school rather than B’s or C’s, while an F is equivalent to actual physical violence.

What then are the downstream consequences of these good intentions? Those who never get an F will never learn how life-affirming an F actually is: an F sobers a mind numbed by success—an F introduces us to ourselves in a way an A never will. For the unhealthy who do not know they are on a tight rope above an abyss, they may never know the self-knowledge of strategic self-inflicted suffering: the simple and savage thrill of hill sprints or the ultra mental clarity of a water fast. For the addict, a walk down Kensington in Philadelphia is revealing. Sure enough, we will see at least one corpse sprawled on the sidewalk with a needle in a vein. And for the felons, they unhappily never learn a different way of life, and happily get to do more felony.

Who decided it is compassionate to let an individual die an early death? Or live a long and possibly unawake living death? It is clear many practitioners of modern compassion are driven by love, neither wanting to suffer nor allow others to suffer. There are also some who simply do not care enough to ask the question in the first place. And there are a select few who know this is a problem and pour gasoline on it because they want to see the world burn.

But what of those who literally cannot handle suffering? A moth gave me an answer when it flew into my hotel room through the open sliding doors. I looked up from my legal pad, saw it fluttering and changing elevation as if it were drunk driving, and went back to my writing. Prior to bed I was about to shut the lights off when the moth flew in front of my eyes. I knew it had one, maybe two weeks left to live. I was exhausted, but I resolved this mottled brown moth would not die a hotel-death. I chased after it trying to cup it in my palms with my fingers lightly bridged. It put up a fight. At last, I had it, and threw it out of the sliding doors. It will live, and die, by the sun and the moon.

It turned my mind to the question of stewardship. The moth is a child. The moth is a dog. The moth is all that is good and pure, all that is truly helpless as opposed to those who are treated as if they were helpless, all that look to us as stewards. They are therefore worth suffering for.

So much for the modern form of compassion.

What then about ancient compassion?

I read Herman Lehman’s life story. Herman was a white captive of Comanche warriors, abducted in 1870. They did not kill him because their ancient intuitions could sense the fire raging in his gut. He showed the archaic signs of a warrior. The Comanche’s saw this, and decided to give him the chance to join their tribe.

The leader, Carnoviste, was not gentle because he was preparing Herman for the ungentle reality of the ancestral world: “Carnoviste began to teach me to ride wild horses, to jump from the ground astraddle the horse as he ran by, and dodge an arrow at the same time. I was taught to crouch closely to the neck of the horse so an enemy could not hit me, and how to use a shield and ward off arrows… I was given a shield and placed off about thirty yards. Four braves took bows and blunt arrows and began to shoot at me. I knew what I had to do, for I had seen the performance before. I began moving the shield up and down and from left to right. The arrows poured against it and I managed to ward them off with the wavy motion, but torrents of blunt sticks came and I was too slow. One passed just over the shield and struck me in the forehead. I saw stars—not those pained ones on my shield, but real fiery flashes—it downed me and those comrades let up shooting for a time, but the target practice was soon resumed, and I had to learn how to use the shield. I was knocked down several times before I became adept. All Indians were thus trained.”

Sure enough, Lehman’s training came full circle: he deflected bullets with his shield at close range in multiple firefights. It saved his life—and the lives of those he was responsible for.

I imagine the elders sounded like this: Are you getting shot at? Then lift your shield. Do you see stars? Then get back on your feet, scream your war scream, and lift your shield. Did you get shot by an arrow? Does your own blood unsettle you? Then take a breath, lift your shield, and get back in the fight—for yourself, and for your tribe. If you do not, you will die. If you do, you might live. So get the fuck up.

Many Comanche parents did not like this brutal treatment of their young. It hurt them more emotionally than it hurt their children physically. But times were hard.

The ancient mode of compassion—of suffering with—is practiced as a holy rite by all those who roam raw prairies beneath the moon or fly Little Birds through river valleys above the graceful red arcs of rocket propelled grenades. It is here we must be ruthlessly hard on both others and ourselves. But to inflict that same ruthlessness on a mutt, a child, a friend, or a stranger at present, is no longer compassion, but cold-blooded brutality.

We are called to suffer with unprecedented nuance.

Philosopher Walter Kaufmann wrote “What is man? Most men have eyes but see not, and ears but hear not. Yet it is not their fated lot to be blind and deaf. They can be awakened.” His words were on my mind as I was watering my fig trees. I saw a small weed growing in a crack in my driveway. Time slowed as I realized this was one small symbol of the primeval world—the world of the Comanches and blood-tipped arrows—reasserting itself. The illusion of control was gone. The illusion of safety was invalidated. The illusion of civilizational bliss lasting for eternity was disproven by one green stem with three lacerated leaves smashing through man-made asphalt to stretch its little arms and innocently soak in the summer sun.

It was a threat—that which once stoked the need for ancient compassion. So what awakens us? What else but seeing a threat? Especially when, in the modern world, threats are neither as self-evident nor as frequent as they were for the Comanches. And what else but hearing the rumor of hard times, and then actually taking it seriously, well before the lightning finally strikes?

If we respect that hard times are not yet upon us but will inevitably rise again, then we choose to suffer for; if we choose to suffer for, then we must define who and what we will suffer for; and if we define who and what we will suffer for, then meaning and purpose become clear. A slow, calm, grounded meaning that charges every cell we possess with a singular purpose worth dying—and living—for.

Physical training to look good is modern; training to carry melons or meat on a ten mile walk is ancient; training to be useful when the moths in our lives are in danger, and to do so by choice before the threat arises, is to suffer for.

Studying to be known as learned is modern; studying to ensure the camp is not massacred beneath the moon is ancient; studying to be a learner who can see through the lies and fictions slowly taking over the modern world is to suffer for.

It is to see and hear while voluntarily living on the edge of existence, unapologetically awake, alive, and primed for a good fight on behalf of the whole.

Εἰς μελέτην

For meditation