D r. Christiaan Barnard is the surgeon who performed the first heart transplantation operation. Besides being a rare expert in medicine and surgery, Dr. Barnard was an inspiring writer and eloquent speaker.
Explaining how we should not merely stay alive, but celebrate beingalive,hesays.“onedoesnotbecomenoblebysuffering,butone becomes noble by experiencing suffering”.
The simple, but enigmatic words set us thinking. What is the difference between ‘suffering’ and ‘experiencing suffering’? How does ‘experiencing’ make one noble?
It has bearing with the difference between merely staying alive and celebrating being alive. When we are struck by an illness or a difficulty let us assume we just pass through all the discomforts, sorrows and ordeals the situation causes for us. At the end of it all we have remained what we were before that calamity befell us. Then we have only suffered. But if we pass through the suffering as an experience, react to it, and may be, draw pertinent lessons from it, it is then that we have experienced suffering.
When a teacher teaches a class, the teaching goes equally to the inanimate things in the classroom and to the students. While there is no change whatsoever in the furniture, the students get some learning outcome as a result of the experience. There has to be a behavioural changeinthestudentsonaccountofexperiencingsuffering.Ifnosuch behavioural change takes place in some students after they ‘suffer’ the teaching, how are they better than the inanimate furniture in the classroom?
Apuny,shyyoungmanwasthrownoutofafirstclasscompartment in a remote railway station in South Africa. You would have guessed that it is Mohandas Karam Chand Gandhi who suffered several indignities as a ‘Coolie Lawyer’. Gandhi was evicted from the first class compartment by an arrogant inconsiderate white man only on account of the colour of his skin. With his bag and baggage, he spent the whole night in bitter cold. It was there that he experienced suffering and became a transformed man. An unknown white man threw Gandhi out of the first class compartment. The same Gandhi who became acclaimed all over the world as ‘the Mahatma’ hurled the white man out of his country.
Thus, experiencing suffering ennobles man.
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There is another similarly puzzling thought given by Dr. Barnard in the simplest possible words: “What is important is not what you have lost, what is important is what you have left”.
Out of what we have, sometimes we lose something and it makes us sad. When we are cheated or by our own folly we happen to lose something, we are haunted by a feeling of defeatism and even though what we have lost is of little or no consequence it worries us and we are unhappy.
On the other hand, if we voluntarily part with (even a little of) what we have for a cause which we heartily believe is a worthy and noble one, a great feeling of contentment fills our heart and we experience a feeling of joy. That is why our Rishis have said Enjoy by renouncing.
If somebody picks a paltry sum from my pocket, even though it does not affect me in any way, I feel unhappy because I have lost something. In contrast, I help someone in need and see him well out of his difficulty I feel satisfied and happy. Let us try to derive joy out of leaving and avoid the grief of losing.
Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my mother would never sleep. She would wash her kitchen utensils and she and I would dig the rocky, white ant – infested surroundings. We planted flowering bushes. The White ants at once destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed.
At that time, my father’s transfer order came. A few neighbours asked my mother why she was exerting herself so much to beautify a government house. Why was she planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant? My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, “ I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than I had inherited.”
That was my first lesson in success – It is not what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind.