Dukkha
Note: To better understand one of the references in this post, it helps to first read my July 5th post, “Honey and Onions”
I like the coherence and universality rooted in the first Buddhist noble truth — Dukkha: Life contains suffering, dissatisfaction, and impermanence. Fortunately, existence is more than just suffering and dissatisfaction, but there’s no denying physical pain and emotional grief are tightly woven into the fabric of our lives.
Before I set out on my trek, I expected I would have to swallow buckets of aches and pain. And indeed, there were days when I felt like I was hooked up to an intravenous drip of suffering -- an endless supply of 1000 cc bags of headwind dukkha. I even named my cross-country blog “Dukkha 3500” for the number of miles I estimated I would be subjecting myself to distress, misery, and agony.
During the trek, the question I asked myself almost daily was how much more could I endure? The answer, it turns out, was “a lot.” There is a wealth of literature that reflects on voluntary suffering for noble causes, and my trek certainly aligns with existential works (e.g., freely chosen hardship is more meaningful than “comfortable conformity”). The expression “no pain, no gain” is trite but true, especially when it is in service to a goal that has special significance.
Don’t get me wrong – I didn’t suffer the entire 3,500 miles. There is a distinction between extreme effort and suffering. Most of the time, even climbing some mountain passes, I did not suffer. I don’t mind, and sometimes even enjoy extreme effort. There’s a crossover point, however, where maintaining the same level of effort creates suffering.
No one wants to hear about the labor pains. They just want to see the baby.
- As attributed to Johnny Sain, in Jim Bouton’s book, Ball Four
You all are reading about my baby, but if you’ll indulge me a little, I’d like to share my labor pains. My purpose is not to list a litany of aches and pains like some alte-kaker (Yiddish for old-timer) but instead to simply convey the varied manifestations of dukkha that became part of my daily routine.
The elements: As you can imagine, riding a bicycle across the country meant that I was continually exposed to the elements. The sun and wind did their worst. The weeks at high altitude were the equivalent of riding through an open-air rotisserie, and I soon became overcooked. I soon felt crusty and crinkly.
Riding into the wind was frustrating on many levels, not just because I was working against a fickle and invisible foe. As I wrote in my July 27 post The Trap of Unmet Expectations, whenever the wind would suddenly change directions and transform from an empowering to a debilitating force, its whimsical nature inevitably led me to chew on the bitter shreds of my self-made disappointment. Physically, riding into the winds’ relentless energy always led to a sense of utter bodily depletion. One day in Nebraska I rode against the wind for an entire day – 75.39 miles of raw, unfettered suffering.
Chafe: By the time I reached Indiana, the upper reaches of my left thigh look like the landscape of an alien red planet. The repetitive motion did not allow the skin to recover; even showering, drying, and coating the exposed areas in a thick snowfall of talc powder was not curative. The discomfort reached a crescendo on Day 49 when it felt like I was riding with a hot poker resting on the spot where my thigh joined my torso. If chafe were a currency, I’d be bloody rich.
Terrain: I didn’t go into the hurt-locker on each and every climb. The 30-mile climb up the rail-trail to Snoqualmie Pass never peaked above a 2% gradient and thus did not require me to dig deep. But some climbs were miserable, either because of the heat or because the ramps were so steep (or both). For example, when I ascended Teton Pass and crossed from Idaho to Wyoming, the 13-mile climb increased from manageable 5% grades up to 8% and then, closer to the pass, rocketed to a leg-shredding 12% gradient. On straight stretches I felt I was looking up from the bottom of a ski-jump. I valiantly fought to keep moving forward, the warning lights on my internal dashboard blinking red, klaxons screaming as I drew on the body’s ever-lessening energy stores. Pulling over onto the gravel shoulder for a rest, I could barely summon the energy to safely unclip from the pedals and collapse my head onto the handlebars. I stood there, chest flailing, my tell-tale heart thumping loudly with the sound of blood sluicing in my ears.
Looking down at the 12% grade (i.e., from the top of the ski slope) on the climb to Teton Pass.
How the Body Responded: Like a heartless ancient slave master, my mind cracked the whip and pushed my body forward, always forward. The body did the mind’s bidding, often reluctantly, and though unable to resist the mind’s commands, it communicated its displeasure in the stark but clear language of pain. At first, the pain was a response to getting used to the daily grind (such as the knee and chest pain I wrote that about occurred at the beginning of the trek). But as the weeks passed, the body found other ways to call attention to itself. Chafe was the most blatant example, but later I felt the muscles covering the left side of my ribs burn with pain when I used the core muscles to lift something above my waist. The pain came to a screaming climax one evening in Confluence, PA when I sat up in bed, felt a “pop!” in my ribs, and then doubled over in agony. But that’s a story for another post.
I am thankful my body didn’t go into full slave rebellion mode and respond drastically by ripping or tearing muscles, tendons, and ligaments that would have stopped me in my tracks. Instead, I lived with a diffuse, background soreness, and suffered a slow, gradual depletion. I never had a single event where I “hit the wall” and “bonked” (to use a well-worn non-scientific term for burning through my glycogen stores), probably because I ate continuously. But I could never eat or drink enough. In retrospect, most of the ride was a long, gradual bonk.
I’ve read that dukkha is actually only loosely translated as “suffering.” In the classical Middle Indo-Aryan Pali language, the root of dukkha is analogous to a potter’s wheel where the axle and hole are not aligned, resulting in an unsatisfactory experience and creation. This analogy works just as well for a bicycle wheel -- when things are not aligned, the ride of one’s life is bumpy. The source of my daily dukkha diet on the trek -- the fierce sun, relentless winds, steep mountains, burning chafe, sharp aches and overall physical depletion – were easily identifiable. I knew they were on the menu, and thus they were relatively easy to accept.
To be clear: there was nothing ennobling about my suffering. The nobility in the Buddhist truth is that it is transformative and timeless. My suffering just was, like a bad fever, and relatively short-lived. By comparison, my sister-in-law, Hindy Shaman, had been living with cancer for almost two decades by then. The chafe, the oxygen-starved thigh muscles, the overall sense of depletion – all would relent after I ceased my effort. But for Hindy and millions living with cancer and other chronic diseases, the suffering never goes away.
Even in the throes of a suffer-fest, like the day-long headwinds in Nebraska, I was not absolutely miserable. Riding into the headwind was Sisyphean, and I pushed my body to the limit while the mind despaired. But even as the wind metaphorically sprayed me with bitter onion-chaff, I was still able to draw upon a deep well of honey that fueled my forward progress. And had a reporter on a motor-bike come up alongside me, shoved a microphone in my face, and asked, “Mr. Calem… is the pain worth it?” I would have replied, without hesitating, “Yeah, it’s worth it.”