How You Feeling?

"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."

Chuck Palahniuk


Take a look around, baby. Pain is everywhere.

On one level there is physical pain. There are one hell of a lot of people out there living in many different levels of pain.

Physical pain is straight ahead. It shows up in your life, slaps you around and dares you not to deal with it. You deal with it as you choose; traditional medicine and medical treatment, alternative medical practices, booze, drugs, denial, self-pity, crawling for the pity of others.

The relation between pain and a reaction to it would seem to be black and white, but it's not that simple. People experience pain differently. What is excruciating to one person is baby stuff to somebody else. A person with a high threshold of pain will put treatment off until they are crawling on their hands and knees through the drive-up window at KFC. A person with a low threshold of pain will be in the doctors office the day before they stub their toe.

There is a psychology of pain that exists on many levels. Many people love to talk about their problems, brag about their "meds", because it draws attention to them, it perversely makes them feel important. These are the people who do not mind endless trips to the doctor or physical therapist, and our esteemed medical community just loves to indulge them.

There is the perception of pain. You walk around with a limp, everybody notices and the conversation flows. People in chronic pain "get used" to it, they learn how to mask it. If they make the mistake of talking about it, their co-workers are off to the side minutes later saying "He's full of crap. He doesn't look like he is in pain."

There is a discussion out there that debates whether or not pain is felt in the body or the mind. If you burn your finger, is your finger feeling the pain or is your mind feeling the pain?

Whatever the considerations, physical pain can be learned from. How to be avoided in the future, what actions can be taken to guard against it. It can also give a person perspective. It can change your understanding of life. It can dramatically redefine the word fragile.

Pain covers the entire spectrum of human experience. All the idiosyncrasies and bumps and burps and twisted associations and mind games and anxieties and fears of just being human.

It is all pain.

Pain demands a response. That is its purpose. But on the psychological side of things it is easy to bury it, ignore it or sculpt it into something it is not.

We humans, crafty beings that we are, will find endless ways to turn suffering into something else. A weapon, a defense or an excuse.

Pain wakes us from the lethargy that is pleasure. "We have no scar to show from happiness." The good stuff becomes status quo, numbs us because we don't really know what we have.

So we don't learn from it.

There is this vapid "gratefulness" movement that attempts to mine the beauty of the good stuff. Focusing on the pleasure in our lives should teach us something. It should teach us how to live.

But the "gratefulness" movement is superficial. It is jingoistic. If you are going to get anything out of the good stuff in your life you have to do it on your own and in your own way.

Humans have a limited capacity to accomplish that.

Pain is the ultimate teacher.

It gets your attention, it ravages you or is defeated by you, and it definitely leaves its mark.

You can ignore the lessons and go gentle into that good night, or you can evolve.