Do You Suffer For Things That Don’t Matter?

My elder brother told me a story of his experience in a Catholic seminary where he had his secondary education. At a point in his junior class, he was among those assigned to serve at the table of the teacher-prefects in the refectory. Teacher-prefects are fresh secondary school leavers who are sent back to their alma mater to help mentor their junior ones for one year before proceeding to the next stage of their training for priesthood.

It happened that the number of glass plates provided at the table of these teacher-prefects was short of one to go round the number posted to the seminary for that year. Consequently, at every meal, one of them must eat with an old stainless plate – a dinning ware that survived from the past before the glass plates were introduced by the school. But then none of them “enjoyed” using this old plate and would always reproach their junior ones whenever they found the plate set at their sitting position at the table. Nonetheless, the glass plates were not enough to go round.

As one who attended seminary myself, I’m well aware that the reaction of these teacher-prefects runs contrary to a core value taught in the seminary: contentment with what one has been given and non-attachment to things that don’t really matter. Some people don’t have food to eat while some others are only worried by the fact that their food is served on a stainless and not a glass plate.

The above represents a common attitude of humans. We desire food, and when we have food, we begin to worry about the material, shape and colour of the plate in which it is served. We desire clothes to cover our nakedness, and when we have them, we start worrying about their style, material and colour. We seek for a roof over our our head, and when we have it, we become worried about it height, colour and design.

Our life on this planet is already burdened by too many sufferings for us to have the luxury of adding more, especially when these extra burdens relate to things that are at best symbolic and at worst illusory. A colour, for instance, is valued only because society has assigned value to it. The preciousness or otherwise of any colour is a creation of human mind. For example, while purple signifies royalty in the ancient Roman tradition, it signifies mourning and sadness in the Catholic liturgical tradition. Nature only gave us colours, but we named them and assigned values to them. The same way nature gave us food and we’re now worried about the nature of plate in which it’s served, how the table where we eat it is decorated and even the quality of the dinning chair we sit on to eat.

We will suffer less when we become grateful for what has been given to us (especially when it will soothe our hunger, quench our thirst, cover our nakedness and shade us from sun and rain) and worry less about the mere symbolic. Truth is that many a time, much of out suffering is on things that ultimately don’t matter. Let everyone of us ponder about this!

This is my meditation this midweek.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.