This Pain I Take, This Pain I Give

"How we used to fetishize and differentiate our feelings. Rage! Hatred! Hunger! Pride! Jealousy! Ambition! Lust! We had a name for everything. But the colorful cavalcade of emotions was just a sham. It was all pain - all of it - all along... And what about Love - our alpha and omega, our porn and our purity? ...love? Yes, love was pain as well. 
Especially love." 
~ Nod, Chapter 1, Adrian Barnes

I lingered in conversation with a friend one night. Someone who astounds me with her ability to retain her identity despite the madness that claws and bites and tears. Someone who has had more than her fair share of bad luck, yet hasn't let it shrink her soul.

When we talk with people on the same plane as us, I like to think an ongoing discourse arises - a common intellectual and spiritual theme which strengthens and evolves.

It's a beautiful thing when you can create a concept that gives bones to the blood and muscle of your feelings. Suddenly your emotion becomes more than a moaning puddle of flesh on the floor. You can name it. You can face it. You can even wrestle with it. But then you realize what it was all along.

Pain.

Over time, I've sharpened my thoughts on pain with the musings of other philosophers - King David, Solomon, Job, Aristotle, Plato, Confucious, Schopenhauer...

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
~ C.S. Lewis

What is the point of pain? Pain is a tool. It is a teacher. A searing heat that bubbles your skin and burns your flesh keeps your hand out of the fire. Angry insults that stab your core teach you to pick better friends. THAT is the point of pain. But it is a teacher that wants to be a tyrant.

Scrape away the trappings and confusion, you're left with a fairly simple construct for what creates pain.

Behold, the Triad of Pain.

Pain Caused by Nature          Pain Caused by Others               Pain Caused by Me

Nature is fallen. It is imperfect. In balancing, it destroys. In life, there is death. Cancer is just another form of death. Losing a limb is another form of death. A tornado that destroys thousands of homes is pain caused by nature. A funeral and the aching loss to follow is an ache at the fist of death.

Man is fallen. Man is imperfect. In surviving, he destroys. In emotional and irrational thought, he cannot see ahead of his immediate choices and needs. He lacks foresight. He is burdened by need. The drug addict who lies to his baby's mother to get money for cigarettes is so much in pain himself that he causes pain in others, blindly or otherwise.

I am fallen. I am imperfect. In my need, I destroy. This, and only this, is the pain I can control. This is the pain I can embrace and ultimately overcome.

If you were to take an inventory of your pain, where would it fall? How much of it is caused by you? How much is caused by others?

The truth is this. Everyone is going to hurt you at some point or another. What we have to decide is who is worth the pain.

When you give body to your pain, it immediately loses just a little of its edge. Pain is at its most potent when carrying the aura of confusion. When you are confused, pain can better influence you. Like the wild dog in a trap that snaps at the person trying to free it. Simply because it cannot see through the hurt.

You know better than anyone what causes you harm, what torments your mind, what wakes you up at 3:00am, what knots your stomach, what bleeds the tears from your eyes.

Give your pain a body and then...wrestle it to the ground.