metonymy4u

when i am faced with emotional suffering the emotion is often accompanied by a thought about something i think i don’t have. i naturally come to the conclusion that to alleviate the suffering, i need to acquire the thing that i’m thinking i don’t have. the object of problem solving then becomes this fantasized absent item (or event or relationship or whatever…). acquiring behavior is then reinforced through a negative reinforcement schedule, and suffering never really ends. the entire process is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the problem. the nature of the problem, actually, is that suffering has arisen and needs some attention. the moment of suffering itself is the problem and the solution to the suffering problem is in the moment, not in the acquiring of the fantasized item. the problem isn’t so much that i want this fantasized item, but that i fail to understand that its possession or loss has nothing whatever to do with suffering. it is truly irrelevant. this would not be such a big deal except for the fact that it distracts me from actually solving the problem at hand: what to do about suffering. the suffering is real. it demands our attention. if we allow ourselves to constantly be distracted from understanding it, how can we be surprised that we never actually figure out how to respond to it?