On Pain

Pain makes people act in unhealthy ways; unhealthy towards themselves and towards other people. This often creates yet more pain, dirtying the collective pool, so to speak.

A few things are important to remember.

As mentioned, pain makes us act in ways that we would not normally choose to.

Repressed pain can be like potential energy, like a compressed spring, a snake coiled and ready to strike when cornered and threatened just that little bit more. And then it can be surprising if you weren’t paying attention to the pain the person was suffering, and especially the pain one was causing the other.

All pain dirties our collective pool.  Lashing out and pushing back dirties our collective pool.  But sometimes we need to defend ourselves. Or sometimes a parent applies the appropriate type and amount of discipline to help guide a child.

If pushing back a small amount immediately prevents someone from causing a greater amount of pain over the long term, then it might be appropriate. Those ifs and mights are difficult to judge for the best of people, and I am not one of them.

No one wants to be in pain. Some people find comfort in pain because they are, tragically, used to it. But no one, if given a perfectly informed choice for pain or no pain, would choose pain.  (All things considered; loss of freedom is a type of pain, for example; so if the decision is freedom and pain or slavery but absence of pain, this is a false choice.)

No one wants to cause anyone else pain, either.  We only cause others pain when we forget ourselves, when we are blind due to our own pain. Even the cruelest people mostly act out of a combination of their own pain.  (It may have been many, many spiritual lifetimes of pain, mind you.)

The problem for generations of families and society as a whole is that this pain tends to accumulate over time, building up and building up like a black mass, a dark matter, a cancer.  What we need to do is release it, release the pain, love ourselves, and love each other.

I don't have any easy answers for how to do that.  I have both experienced a lot of pain in my life and caused it.  It's heartbreaking.  Sometimes it seems so simple I wonder how I ever allowed myself to be hurt or live in pain.  Other times it seems so inescapable.  And I have yet to figure out the difference between the two.  If I do, I will give it away for free.