We'd Rather Suffer than Suffer

I've got a thing with my ankle. The ligament is overstretched from too many sprains over the years. So as I walk, the ligament may unpredictably slip out of place and, BAM, I essentially have a sprained ankle. Amid a nice stroll, or while hurrying to an appointment, walking suddenly becomes impossible, passersby assume the poor man has Tourette's, and I need to figure out how the hell to get home.

I've avoided surgery, managing via physical therapy plus a bag of tricks for resetting the ligament on the fly. It's shakily under control. But this is not a posting about ankles. It's about framing. About perspective. About attitude.

This morning, as I took a walk, I suddenly realized that I've enjoyed several days of uninterrupted, easy, pain-free walking. And I felt a shower of gratitude, tinged with irony over how easily we forget to proclaim small victories. It's comically hard to celebrate what passes for normality.

A dissenting voice piped up in my thought stream. "Don't say that! You're inviting problems!"

This, for your information, was the voice of my Jewish ancestors (after all the pork, I'm amazed they're still speaking to me), delivering a core tenet of Judaism. Nearly everything you'd imagine fundamental to Jewish life—bagels, beards, black hats—evolved 55 or 60 centuries into the timeline, but this trope goes back practically the whole way: Don't clock your luck! Don't note your success! Don't proclaim happiness or victory because you're only inviting problems!

And it's unimaginably stupid and counterproductive. I struggle to understand how it's lasted all these centuries. The upshot—and I'm Mr. Upshot— is that when it's bad, you suffer. And when it's good, you suffer. All this to avoid suffering. Suffering's so bad that we'd rather suffer than suffer.

As I strode along on a lovely late-summer day, my ankles didn't hurt a bit. I was completely free to walk for miles. Delicious liberation. And if my very next step were to bring agony, so what? I'd try to readjust the ligament, perhaps devising a new move to add to my repertoire. And I'd take a taxi home if necessary. The fate my ancestors would have me avoid at all costs is a mere stumble, while the capacity to walk is a small miracle fit for celebration.


The idea behind ‘Don’t clock your luck/Don’t note your success/Don’t proclaim happiness or victory’ may have been more like karma-yoga before it calcified over time into small-minded superstition. Do what you do full-heartedly, without wasting effort on credit or status.

More on karma yoga here, or via postings with that tag.