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The Four Noble Truths
There is unsatisfactoriness. (AKA Dukkha) There is the cause of unsatisfactoriness. (AKA Tanha) There is an end to unsatisfactoriness. The path that leads to the end of unsatisfactoriness.

In a nut shell ...One enter the Path because one are not satisfied with 'what is life', only to find that 'life is what it is' and is all there is...and as we gradually progress along the Path (the more we accept 'what is as it is' ) the more satisfied we become...

People are queer, they're always crowing, scrambling and rushing about
Why don't they stop someday, address themselves this way?
Why are we here? Where are we going? It's time that we found out
We're not here to stay; we're on a short holiday

Life is just a bowl of cherries
Don't be so serious; life's too mysterious
You work, you save, you worry so
But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go
So keep repeating it's the berries
The strongest oak must fall
The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned
So how can you lose what you've never owned?
Life is just a bowl of cherries
So live and laugh at it all

@person said:
Working on insight and seeing the workings of self and suffering to ultimately uproot its causes. Which also helps in the here and now.

I wholeheartedly agree, insight is the key faculty one should develop. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” as Socrates famously said. I find insight has a lot to do with seeing beyond the obvious, looking beyond the surface layer of things.

Following Thich Nhat Hanh for a while, watching his videos and his short talks, is really beneficial for this, you can learn a lot about looking deeply from Thay. With uprooting suffering one should go cautiously, it is possible to be too drastic about it.

These days, I am more in favour of providing insight as a way of watering the seeds of what will grow tomorrow, and taking a gardeners approach to bringing to a flourishing the plants that grow naturally, and gently pruning those areas which are in danger of overgrowth. Just to use a metaphor for the growing of the self.

@Jeroen said:

@Jeroen said:
The last few days I have been revisiting the feelings I have around my stepfathers death. It was one of the most difficult things I have done, coming downstairs in our shared house early in the morning to make coffee and listening to his laboured breathing as he lay in bed on morphine slowly dying in the annexe to the living room. In a way that was suffering for me, he was one of my closest and longest friends and I loved him for being such a good partner to my mother, even though the Alzheimer’s made him into someone new also.

That experience has been working its way through my soul, it has been harrowing but has also revealed new depths, and in a way it has made me conclude that suffering is just part of the human condition, something that is meant to impart wisdom and empathy and understanding. I don’t think that after an experience like that you can look at death and loss in the same way.

In a way this has made me realise that I no longer look for the Buddha’s solution to suffering, the idea of Nirvana and being free from it all. Some forms of suffering are indispensable parts of the process of human growth, I’ve come to realise.

This puts me all in mind of a farmers wisdom, that plowing the land is a process of harming and disturbing the earth, only to provide fertile soil for seeds to fall onto and a new growth. It’s funny I had no idea where this came from, I haven’t thought about these things since we were taught about farming in primary school.

I make a division between the worldly and the transcendent in my mind. For life in the world, I find the philosophy of Taoism speaks to me more. Things operate in a balance, moving from one state to the other, in dependence on one another. For a longer term (multiple lives, just in case) view Buddhism speaks more to me. Working on insight and seeing the workings of self and suffering to ultimately uproot its causes. Which also helps in the here and now.