Somewhere before my first journey to Asia, I began investigating Buddhism. I was surprised how little I had known about it throughout my Christian upbringing. I think from some very conservative Christian book (which had essentially equated Buddhism with Satanism), I got the idea that Buddhism was merely a hollowed emptiness, devoid of all meaning or joy. But when I actually spent time talking with some Buddhist monks in Southeast Asia, seeing their daily lifestyles, watching their peaceful and beautiful relationships with the locals each morning (at the crack of dawn, faithful locals from all corners of the village would line the dusty streets with a portion of their early morning cooking and the monks would slowly shuffle around with their food bowls, smiling and blessing each townsperson. Devout monks have vowed to eat not a single piece of food unless it is given to them. When I describe it now, it sounds almost like begging, but it was clearly a much more sacred and equal exchange of love.) And the ancient texts reinforced this with scriptures centering around Peace, Love, and Hope.
So I went through a sort of honeymoon-type fascination with Buddhism where I saw it as truly offering a lot of the answers that were at least partially unanswered throughout the questioning of my twenties. But, as with any belief system, there came a time when that simmered down into a more realistic phase where I began asking myself how I could incorporate Buddhism in my life. There were parts that were clearly out of the question, such as the more superstitious Buddhist "religion" which deals with offerings, sacrifices, curses, blessings, and corruption. But then there was the purer, more tangible and practical "original" form which dealt with how to view and handle the suffering of this world. The core of this can be stated very succinctly as a good friend of mine, Alex, just summed up in an email:
"Suffering arises from attachment to desires; Suffering ceases when attachment to desire ceases." - The Second and Third Noble Truths of Buddhism
Let me give an example of how this might work. Joo and I have been searching for a house in Athens for the past two months or so and we just recently found one we really liked this past week. It came on the market around 2:00 pm, our agent called us at 2:30 to notify us, and we jumped in the car around 3:15 and drove the two and a half hours down to Athens. We checked it out, loved it, and put in our first ever bid on a home. We gave the sellers until 6pm on the following day to accept or reject our offer, signed all the papers, and nervously but excitedly drove back to West Liberty, talking of various ways we would improve and remodel that particular house.
Around 2:00 the next afternoon, we got a call from our real estate agent Brooks, "Well, Daniel, I wish I had good news for you, but it turns out another couple saw the house around 4:30 and purchased it immediately. Unbeknownst to us, it was already sold by the time you were looking at it. In fact, another couple already put a backup order in cash, and both offers were $15,000 more than your offer."
Now, keeping in mind that this is a very very minor example of suffering, let's look at some different approaches on how to handle this, assuming these could work on much larger forms of suffering as well.
1. Mom took a fatalistic/optimistic type approach saying, "If it works out, it was meant to be, and if it doesn't, there was some reason you weren't supposed to have the house."
2. Communication. Either through prayer, or talking it out with family or friends, receiving strength and comfort in a common bond.
3. Buddhism. The Second Noble Truth would say the house or the lost bid itself didn't cause us suffering, but rather our growing attachment to the thought of living in it. The Third Noble Truth would say that we could overcome that suffering by simply dropping our attachment.
All of them are very valid and effective. I chose a little technique I designed years ago called Belaki, which is really a little bit of all three of the above. It basically consists of listing out the negatives of the thing you're attached to and then focusing on them until they expand large enough so that not only do you lose the attachment, but you're actually relieved not to have it. In this, case it was pretty easy for Joo and I. First, there had been the gaping cracks running all around the foundation...
... and of course foundation issues are generally quite complicated ones. Add to that the fact that we both got stuffy noses while we were in the house which could have been from all the mold growing on the rafters...
PLUS the fact that getting the house would have meant leaving Mom and Dad's house soon and that would have been unfortunate since we're having such a good, positive time there... and our garden is continuously developing every day (we've transplanted tomatoes, broccoli, three varieties of peppers, and the rest of our onions, our radishes are sprouting nicely, and our lettuce and spinach are just beginning to show)...
And in almost no time at all, our "suffering" had turned to relief and joy. I didn't even have to use my backup suffering tool of Kregomort (kregomort = kairos + ego + morte) and basically consists of creating as many memories as possible in a short period of time to push the undesirable thoughts/memories back into the distance where they wreak less havoc on the present emotional state.An example of Kregomort might be hanging out with several members of the opposite gender after a hard breakup. Or, as an example of something that worked this week even though I didn't intentionally plan it as I would through Kregomort, I began a new hobby of growing sprouts with some seeds and a sprouter Mom dug up out of the closet...
In other news, Joo and I enjoyed our first harvest from our garden this week as we thinned out the radish sprouts and ate them...
And we celebrated an action-packed May 10th- it was Mother's Day, Joo and my Wedding Anniversary, and my birthday!
Dad got me/us a Cleveland Indians coin saver designated as our "cappuccino maker fund," Joo spent a day making cute fabric flowers for Mom for Mother's day and for my birthday, I got one of the final accessories Joo and I needed for our new home, a high-tech blender which we'll start using immediately for smoothies, hummus, and spreads... 
Incidentally, if you look close at that last blender picture, I do believe you can see the beginnings of a sarari forming in the back of my mouth where my uvula should be. So, after absolving ourselves of our own little sufferings for now, Joo and I turned our energy outwards to the sufferings of others, most notably the poor spruce that got knocked down in a recent windstorm and which Joo has been trying to nurse back to good health...
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