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| High spirits: Claudia laughs on while Mike channels Timmy Cappello. |
To make matters worse, his back was pretty crook as well. These are not the kind of injuries you want when your bread and butter is hauling merchandise in and out of a warehouse all day.
But Ben loves his sport. The weekend before he had taken a catch while playing cricket and slightly misjudging the trajectory of the ball, ended up breaking one of his fingers. Despite the pain and disability this caused him, the next weekend he joined up with the only Aussie Rules football team in Paris. They appreciated not being a man down and won the match, but Ben came away with a badly damaged back.
While I admired his fighting Australian spirit, I shook my head at the wisdom of these actions. It seemed Ben's love for sport routinely caused him undue suffering on and off the field. As Ramadan had made me aware, in order to grow, some degree of hardship might be obligatory, but considering Ben's broken finger I wondered briefly about relationship between suffering and risk.
Could it be that not all suffering is created equal?
If you are going to make suffering in the form of physical exercise a regular habit, I'm sure your local doctor would prefer that you spend an hour in the gym instead of an hour on the football field. In the same way, I'm sure a mother might prefer her son to volunteer for an overseas aid mission rather than sign up to the frontline of battle. In both cases, an equal amount of suffering may be involved, but the risk of injury (or death) on the football field or at war is considerably elevated.
We might examine still other forms of self-imposed suffering, like giving birth or climbing mountains. These have historically carried a high level of risk, but with technological advances of recent times, that risk is being systematically reduced. Modern hospitals and affordable technical clothing have made childbirth and hiking things that doctors might encourage rather than dissuade.
So is the invention of peace and the trend of modern civilisation simply about discovering and promoting non-violent and less risky forms of suffering?
If so, I couldn't recommend the practice of Ramadan more highly to every able bodied and healthy adult. Ramadan is a peaceful and low-risk suffering that can be conducted without changes to your diet or your employment. You can suffer from the comfort of your own home or the office. No special equipment is required to be purchased or used. You don't need guns, bicycles or climbing ropes and you are at less risk of picking up a nasty foreign bug or even pulling a muscle. Because of your reduced food intake, you might even find Ramadan ends up saving you money. And while I might not be able to argue that fasting is less risky than going to the gym, why burn unnecessary carbon on new fangled air-conditioned suffering techniques? With a bit of luck, the earth will also experience some positive growth as a result of your low-risk, low-impact, self-imposed Ramadan suffering.
