Over the summer I went on a short break with a mate. On the way home the flight departed and arrived on time, but like all travel, it had been a long day. Once the aircraft had arrived at the stand there was an unexplained delay in opening the air bridge.
“This always happens in Manchester” my mate fumed “anywhere else in the world you can just get off the aircraft but not in this country” he continued.
Eventually we were allowed off the aircraft, but to my mates further anger, we had to queue at passport control.
“They are treating us like animals” he vented, much to his own distress and our fellow passengers amusement.
The summer, of course, feels a long time ago, but a similar thing happened with a different mate flying home recently. Again, the flight departed and arrived on time. This time there was a delay at baggage reclaim. This mate was equally incandescent.
“Lazy sods” he exclaimed. “I bet all the baggage handlers have done a sicky so they don’t have to work on a bank holiday”.
I watched his distress with both concern and amusement. Different mate, different flight but the same reaction. What is going on?
One way to look at this is to make a distinction between our suffering and our reactions to it. This was the advice of the Buddha 2500 years ago which neatly echoes modern cognitive behavioural therapy.
The Buddha suggested that suffering is unavoidable. Delays on journeys, particularly at the end of journeys when we are particularly tired, is undeniably suffering … albeit of a small, and in the grand scheme of things, meaningless form. I felt some irritations by the delays on both flights too. In this sense both me and my mates experienced the ‘first arrow’ of suffering.
In the case of both my mates, however, they got caught up with this initial distress. They took a meaningless delay and compounded it with further layers of meaning, meaning which served to represent themselves as both helpless and victims. This second layer of suffering is what the Buddha called the ‘second arrow’.
Although none of us have control over the first arrow of suffering, we do have control over the second arrow. It is, after all, self inflicted.
As I saw my mate getting caught up in the second arrow of suffering, I chose to do something different. I reflected on how amazing it is that air travel happens at all, and I tried to imagine, with gratitude, all the people involved in making the flight depart and arrive on time. It did not make the luggage arrive any sooner, but it meant that when it did, I was in a much better frame of mind. My mate, on the other hand, was left with an agitated mind that continued to impact on the task of finding the car, and, presumably, the rest of his day.
Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK. He offers:
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