A world without suffering is easy to imagine. Every human that has lived, members of our species, we language enabled mammals, finding ourselves thrown into this world, experience pain on many accounts. To avoid pain, to seek pleasure is and has been universal. A world without suffering has been a theme of countless legends, stories of all kinds. An old story the Iliad, attributed to Homer, is a poem about the apex of suffering, a protracted war that devastates Troy. Suffering is personal, as Homer knows so well. Odysseus like every one of us, longs to live, and to return home, to family, to safety, to his people.

Paradise, Heaven, a Promised Land, Nirvana, etc., are metaphors for a world where suffering is absent.

But, what would we lose if we lived in such a world? Stretch your imagination to consider whether you’d prefer that world to this one that we know. It is easy, convenient to be in error, wrong about many things- and then to suffer a consequence. To collude, to blithely plan and act, oblivious to my own proclivities which I recognize in retrospect, is the lesson taught by consequences.

But is there any other way? Would you and I have this life be any other than what it is?

To suffer morally,
and then to learn afterwards
that this kind of suffering was founded upon an error,
shocks us.

For there is a unique consolation
in acknowledging, by our suffering,
a “deeper world of truth” than any other world,

and we would much rather suffer
and feel ourselves above reality
by doing so (through the feeling that, in this way, we approach
nearer to that “deeper world of truth”),

than live without suffering and hence without this feeling of the sublime.

The Dawn of Day, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 33

This song by The Eagles is just what we need, a tune to hold onto, Love Will Keep Us Alive.