The Mouth of Pain

This moment is the only moment one ever has. It is the only real. To be outside the present is to have the mind engaged with the past that is dead or the future that has yet to come. Such a mind is not alive to the living present where it actually resides. As soon as the rider dismounts the moment is lost, the surfer is stranded on the bank of time, the continuity of the present flows on without him. He has lost nirvana and is back in samsara's threefold time.

John Crook

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My baby son is melting down. Swollen purple lumps glisten under the surface of his gums. Here and there, the white blades of teeth begin to show themselves. The emergence of his chompers is not a gradual process but a free-for-all, a dental stampede. As far as I can tell from the near-continual caterwauling, fussing, and complaining, he is feeling it all with exquisite sensibility. He walks around the house, mewling, refusing to be distracted by the usual entertainments. Today, even his beloved breasts failed to provide comfort.

In his haze of pain, he is irrational, even for a baby. He signs to ask for milk, but will not drink. He asks to be picked up, only to squirm to be put down. He wants to go outside, then wants to go in. When he does not get what he wants, exactly in the way he wants it, he howls in sudden fury. The minute you irritate him, say by putting him down, he writhes in agony, throws himself to the floor, and crumples into a hot red demon-child. He is miserable, and he is desperate for some relief. Reaching for forbidden objects, yearning to play with the computer, it’s a constant search for some end to the pain; it’s a behavior I recognize from the more restless adventures of my own mind. He has really got to be hurting.

Beyond the effects of pure physical pain, the idea of suffering can also disorder the mind.

I remember clearly the day at the monastery when a guest who had come to live and work with us for several weeks lost her marbles. It was a relatively small meltdown as meltdowns go, but it came out of nowhere. One minute, she was a rational woman picking blackberries; minutes later she was in full-on reaction mode. Her fractiousness continued for several days. Although her targets varied, the complaint was essentially the same: she needed more than she was getting; no one was listening to her; she could not feel safe. Owing to the formalities of life in that place, I was technically the one in charge, and so it fell to me to listen to her as she weathered her mysterious crisis.

When the Roshi came home and the accustomed order was restored, she listened to my account of our guest’s behavior.

“This person,” the Roshi asked, “did she have any health concerns?”

She did. We were clearing blackberries away from the blueberry bushes when she told me about her kidney operation. And that she feared something—I don’t remember it now—that the underlying health issue might be about to recur.

“When people are worried about their health, they often become afraid and irrational,” the Roshi observed.

In the years since that conversation, I’ve been aware of the ways that health worries confer paranoia toward life in general. I see it in others and I see it in myself. Recently, when my child suffered from a mysterious ailment of unknown cause, unknown seriousness, and unknown cure, I felt pangs of fear. They came as a literal stabbing sensation in my body. Because I am bonded to my son, his illness birthed my fear.

We can forget about the body when it doesn’t hurt, but its safety is *our* safety. And of course one day we will not be safe anymore. The body is injured or fails in small ways and large ones, until one day we die. Some of us know enough to worry about this pain, or that pain, or the end of it all. And some of us—the very young, the very old, the very in-the-moment ones of us—live that moment fully as it comes, without anticipating a thing.