The Story Behind Why Must Suffering Exist
I was recently cleaning out some old things from my parents’ house. To me, digging through old things is like digging through memories. I slipped from present to past, remembering the stories that each object held.
One memory that came up was one of a competition among middle-schoolers in my area. We were given a task and a programmable LEGO kit, and we were to create something to solve it. In this particular instance, there was a field with bottle tops, with the robot on one side, and the goal was to get the bottle tops to the other side as fast as we could.
I spent weeks working on it, programming it in my room, then running down to the garage where my dad and I had taped out the arena to test it. My entire February break that year was dedicated to getting it to work, and I thought I had it. The robot could get all the bottle tops to the other side. It didn’t move fast, but it was fast enough.
On the day of the competition, it was time. It pushed the first load of tops into the goal, then rolled back to get the next set. But it rolled off the side of the slab on which the arena was drawn, a dimension they never gave us. Because it was slow, it couldn’t get back up onto the arena, so it couldn’t finish.
I was devastated. All that work had been for nothing, all because of a small detail they’d never given us. I tried arguing that, but it didn’t matter.
As I remembered it, I wondered what I’d say to myself back then. Nowadays, that’s part of my job, dealing with other contractors that forgot to mention some small, important detail and causing me problems. So I could say “It’s going to be good practice for the future, you’ll see”, but that wouldn’t make me feel better.
Then I asked myself “Why must we suffer? Why must we endure so much hardship?” My thoughts turned to the present, and the people suffering now. I wondered again, “Why must we suffer?”
I sat down and wrote Why Must Suffering Exist? as a response to that question. I don’t think I knew where it was going, but I had to write it. In the end, I came up with an answer: “So we may overcome it”. Shared suffering brings with it a shared understanding of others’ troubles. That’s why it exists. It makes us stronger and brings us together.
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