In April 2022, after spending a lovely winter in Miami with my family, I was making the drive back to Connecticut when my brother called: My mom had been hit by a car, she was in critical condition at the hospital, the situation was life and death.  I turned the car around and started driving back to Miami right away.

The next few days were a bit of a blur and I wasn’t really able to contemplate in those early moments.

I had reached out to Mae Neecha to apprise her on the situation and ask some advice; I considered it could be the last opportunity I had to speak with my mom and I wanted her thoughts.

A few days later my mom had stabilized enough for surgery; it was a risky brain operation, but the doctors thought it would help. While I waited for my mom to come out of surgery, I had some time to think.

The thing that had stood out to me most was the image of my mom writhing in a hospital bed in pain. My mom is such a strong woman, she has had numerous accidents and sicknesses in her life, she lives in chronic pain. To see her pain reach a pitch so unbearable was unfathomable to me. To see a body that she had seemingly been in tight control of, which she had learned to manage, to endure, to use so functionally, refuse to allow her to perform basic functions – move, pee, shit, eat, sleep – hit me hard.

This is the cost of having a body. We take up a body imagining the pleasure it will bring, the fun things it will let us do, the fantasies we can play out in it. But the very same neural pathways that allow us to experience pleasure ensure that we will also feel pain. Can anything with a cost so steep really be sukkah? What I see in front of me is so clearly dukkha.

A long time ago I had seen an episode of some supernatural show. In it, the main character was in a hell. Each morning, he woke-up to a beautiful wife and family, he was so happy, but when he went to the garage to get his car and go to work, he encountered a demon. All day the demon would burn him, pull teeth, physically torture him. This, essentially was the main character’s ‘job’. Then, at 6 pm, the character would forget it all and head back up to his family. The next morning, it was rinse and repeat, back to the torture chamber.

We run around life, in this breakable, painable body ignoring the unavoidable torcher that lays in wait just down the hall, around the corner, ready to pounce at any time. We have discomfort constantly – a body that gets hungry, cold, tired, that needs to regulate in changing environments, often its in the background. Sometimes discomfort inches up to pain. Sometimes, as in my mom’s case, to agony. This is part of the physical, rupa nature of bodies. But we forget.

When the pain isn’t too bad, when the worst passes, we head back ‘upstairs’ to our ‘normal life’ and we go on pretending that physical pain is somehow the ‘exception’. But it is the rule. Its is a continual, unavoidable state that comes hand-in-hand with having a body.  If you don’t notice it now, just watch and wait, I promise, it is coming.

That character in that TV show lived in a hell state, he just didn’t realize it. He forgot the pain that had been, that was coming. But the pain was characteristic of the state he was in. Pain is characteristic of being in an embodied state. What is characterized by pain must be dukka. Even if we forget, even if we ignore, it doesn’t change what this world, what having a body really is.