The Buddhist belief that life is a journey of suffering and pleasure was foreign to me until the year of my 50th birthday. Before that year, I had a truly remarkable and blessed life full of joy, adventure, and passion.
I sailed boats around the Caribbean, divided the sky for years as a professional pilot, dated beautiful women, climbed mountains, and chased wild horses through the tall, golden grass of the Australian Outback while mustering cattle from the air. I had eventually found a wife and had two tremendous children, whom I loved dearly.
That all changed when I suddenly received an unexpected call while on holiday with my family on the French Riviera. My sister had died of septicaemia! I hadn’t even known she was sick.
Before that call, I hadn’t been to a funeral, lost a friend to cancer or alcoholism, or faced the realisation that perhaps I wasn’t destined for the greatness that I’d always expected. I also had not yet dealt with ageing, being alone and unhappy, or, more impactful than all these, the deep suffering of losing a child.
Following the unexpected death of my sister, I experienced the loss of my Uncle Peter, who had cared for me during my youth. After that was my father’s death, the loss of my wife through divorce, and the passing of my loving dog. And then came the most impactful experience of my life—the loss of my son. The suffering part of life had certainly arrived!
When considering the concept of balance in one’s life, I had to ask myself whether what I had experienced was payback for all those years of wonderment or just the normal ebb and flow of pain and pleasure, as taught by the Buddha.
Suffering was predominant for me on this journey now, so I wanted to find out more about it. I desperately wanted to know how Buddhists viewed it. Perhaps these monks I’d often seen, clad all in orange, could tell me how to free myself of that suffering by understanding it correctly?