I think the Buddha meant that suffering is a part of every person’s life, not that a person is in misery all of the time. As you mentioned, the source of suffering is the wanting - the wanting of things to be different than they appear to be. To a person, the road of life appears to be fraught with hazards, and no person is skillful enough to avoid all of the obstacles all of the time. The ups and downs you think you feel are thoughts that arise as you “travel the road”. Patterns of thought seemingly emerge, and “train” the person to associate certain conditions with certain feelings. We’ve been taught that, through evolution, conditions that favor the survival of the organism are associated with pleasurable feelings. That’s the game of life. Every person plays the game. Every person uses their own strategy, within their means, in an attempt to feel pleasurable feelings by playing the game a certain way. It’s the basis for essentially everything that happens in our relative world.
Every strategy is a winner in the end, but that doesn’t necessarily help you feel better today. So, what’s the best way to play the game? Should one not play at all? In my humble opinion, I think the answer has something to do with recognizing the game for what it is, total acceptance/surrender, and then taking a fresh look at precisely who or what is playing. In practical relative terms, that means meditation focused on release, letting-go, and surrender; and self-inquiry focused on authenticity and openness. Nothing you haven’t heard before, right? In fact, you probably already know all of this. It’s been my experience that, on occasion, my “knowledge” has been the very thing that prevented an opening for an insight. I don’t really know how that works, but I think it’s related to knowing instead of being, or conceptualizing instead of embodying. Somehow, our knowledge acts as a dam preventing the flow of what is actual. At the very least, our knowledge can muddy the waters to the point of unpleasant confusion. If your project (knowledge structure) looks hopeless, sometimes it’s best to raze it, foundation and all, and start again (or don’t start at all…).
