All is a construct of imagined joy and sorrow, not actual states of beings but imagined states of being used to measure our relationship with our device gamut. As we share our states with others, in verbalizing specifically these sorrows, we must avoid becoming proprietors and peddlers of our own real and perceived misfortunes, and equally avoid the tourism of others’ trauma. This is the fine line between sympathy and empathy. The inward state is an outward state. 

Suffering can feel Sisyphean, Pandorian, or Circean. Each is a paradox of mythological entanglement, of psychological confoundment, of the thing that always threatens our best behavior, our self-helped asses we have engineered into some cryptid through power smoothies, power bars power yoga power wake and walks. Suffering threatens religion, philosophy, and assuredness in our health and wealth. Yet the impulsive doctrine that allows it to eclipse everything else, is maladjusted. It needs to sit in company with the rest, the joy, the trivial and the profound, without becoming an inescapable gravity. How then does the state of sustained suffering not engulf us, not consume us like the gnawing beast of a Bosch painting? How do we make sure its diet is not our flesh, our fear, our failure, but rather it is fed with just the right amount of salt from our tears?

Let suffering simmer, if it must let it hover. Let it hang around. Don’t bury it. Don’t ignore it and don’t accuse it of trespassing. It must become a trusted member of the travel party. And for those who do not know suffering in their youth, in their fortune, fame, privilege and comfort, they ultimately do as their bodies and minds begin to dissolve into the ether. And in that time, if suffering hasn’t been a companion before, it will feel like a thief, a visible one knocking over heirlooms and what seemed unshakable. Blessed are those that know suffering, for theirs is not a future inheritance, but a generous allowance and resilient talisman for what is and what is yet to come.

In the end, we are curators of our own museums, we catalog memories that are no more real and potent than dreams. The pieces on display must be ever rearranged dynamically to reflect our circumstance and audience.