pain…
Ξ February 7th, 2008 | → | ∇ General |
This life, is filled with hurt,
when happiness doesn’t work,
trust me and take my hand,
when the lights go out you’ll understand…
Song lyrics from “Pain” by Three Days Grace.
Filled with hurt indeed.
Frank has a signature on his emails, that I don’t remember precisely, but it goes similarly. With the difference that it cites the importance of coming to an acceptance, an accord with the pain that you experience. Everything in the world changes, and change is always painful. We choose to change, as Anias Nin said, when the pain of remaining stagnant, stable, exceeds the pain of change.
I’m a masochist, so I like to think that I know a few things about pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, spiritual pain. They are representations of each other. They are intertwined whether we recognize it or not. Our physical pain exists biologically to be an indicator of dis-ease, a problem that we have in our physical body. When something becomes severe enough that our body needs to let us know about it, it uses pain to tell us that.
But pain is not only a physical response. We talk all the time about how we experience pain in our body in general, but also how we feel it in our heart, in our spirit. It hurts when a loved one passes unexpectedly. It hurts when someone wounds us emotionally. It hurts when we realize that God has turned his back on us.
Our concept of pain in the west is that it should be avoided at all costs. Pain is something that isn’t good for us. It’s something that means badness, that needs to be fixed. But I often wonder why it is we have that peculiar concept. When it truly comes down to it, pain itself does not harm us. Pain, is in it’s core simply an experience. It’s an experience most of us find unpleasant, but an experience nonetheless.
Being the type of person that defines sex as an act of violence, that finds pain to be only one more aspect of this life to experience, worship, revere, and revel in, I often find that I am put on the fringes of the world I interact with on a daily basis. The world of the people I work with, of most of my traditional ‘family’ looks very different than the world that I inhabit. I look around and pain is part of celebration. Pain is everywhere, it is the base component of suffering, and I honor it’s place in my life.
I don’t know that I can explain why this is. What series of events, or what natural characteristic is it that led me to this obsession with pain? I’m not sure there was one. Perhaps I was born this way, or perhaps growing up as a social pariah helped. Whatever it was I’m here, and I’m exploring what it means to hurt.
