Dukkha Magnets

Consider this. Whether you want to call it stress or dis-ease or dukkha, it is pretty obvious that hospitals function as major dukkha magnets in our society. Their force fields pull in those among us who are suffering the most at any given moment either from disease or dis-ease or both; from stress, pain, trauma, and illness of all kinds. People go or are taken to the hospital when there is literally nowhere else to go, when they have run out of other options and resources. As a rule, hospitals are not places we go to have fun or to be entertained or enlightened. But they are very much the places we go when we seek to be treated and hopefully repaired and fixed (we say “fixed up”) if not cured. We go with the expectation that we will be met and met adequately, met appropriately, and that we will be tended to with care and attention; and if we are very fortunate, perhaps “enlightened” as to what is going on with us and what we need to do. …