What you're running from is the key to what you're looking for.

Reflections on the meaning of pain

I wrote this listening to this.

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I believe I fear pain more than I should. I also believe I give pain far more weight than it deserves.

Things can go very wrong in a million ways in all of our lives at any moment, but they usually go pretty well, all things considered.

But life isn’t really about “things going well.” That is not why I believe any of us are here. Yes, we all orient towards comfort and safety but spiritual/emotional/internal work is about exploring the opposite.

Interestingly, every time things have “fallen apart” in my life, it always turns into an unbelievably valuable experience. It’s when the best things happen. I feel like it is God beaming a light onto all of my assumptions and false ideas and delusions about life and that way I can finally see them clearly for what they are and let them go. It is unbelievably uncomfortable but I think the key is to let it happen. Let the waves crash over you. If you kick and scream in a panic, you’ll drown.

Childbirth is like an extreme version of this idea that we have a very 2-dimensional understanding of pain and the role it should play. Pain does not have to break you. You can withstand way more than you realize.

My (vague and very abstract) understanding is that childbirth is painful on a scale that I cannot comprehend. My own mother always told me that childbirth was the greatest physical pain she had ever experienced¹.

This always led me to wonder: why do I have a little brother? Why does anyone have siblings? By that I mean, why would someone subject themselves to that level of pain more than once? A mother that has given birth does not have an abstract understanding of what it is like, she has already experienced it.

Perhaps because I am unable to make sense of this, whenever I get the chance to, I like to ask the mothers of my friends what it was like to give birth to them. And of course it’s always a revealing conversation. Recently, in one such conversation, a friend’s mother explained to me how she was able to put herself through the experience of childbirth twice more after already knowing what it’s like. The answer was shockingly succinct: within about a week, she had forgotten. That’s what she said. As in, she remembered that it was extremely painful, but it was as if her brain had deleted the actual memory of the pain, and only kept the abstract recollection that it had been very painful. Which made it easier to do it all over again.

This is corroborated by my own mother’s explanation, who’s answer made me realize I was thinking about all of this the wrong way. Here’s how she described it in a text message to me:

I have no actual recollection of the pain I felt during and after I ran a marathon. I just remember that it was painful and I have no doubt I’d recognize the exact feeling should I do it again. What I do feel when I think back on it is that it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. I don’t even think about it in terms of pain. I think about it entirely as a heart-opening exercise that led to a total cathartic breakdown at the end because I knew I had given my all while thinking about the people I most cared about. And they showed up to cheer me on that day.

This feels related to Viktor Frankl’s idea that humans can endure almost any suffering if they can find meaning in it.

Nature clearly figured out a way to make this work. I wailed and writhed on the ground when I returned home after getting braces on for the second time because I hadn’t been putting my retainers on correctly. I was 15 and I felt so ugly and couldn’t bear the thought of my crush Maddie seeing me in them again. High School was rough.

Now it is almost a forgotten memory. I was weighed down by an idea, nothing more.

I remember the anguish of only getting 300 views per video when I’d post them on YouTube. Now, I don’t regret a thing. I look back and I even think that tough period makes my story of eventually breaking through that much more layered. There’s an arc.

Maybe our brains just aren’t made to store the visceral memory of pain for very long. Just the emotional memory of pain. If we feel the pain is justified (the emotions are not negative), than the pain seems secondary. And even there, we can play an active role in how we perceive things, because it is up to you to decide what it’s worth.

Maybe it’s a gift that we’ve all been given. Maybe we over-index the lasting importance of pain or maybe we under-index our ability to move beyond an intense episode.

In Greek Mythology, Prometheus was the Titan that disobeyed the Gods and is responsible for the creation or advancement of humanity, depending on how the story is told. In some versions of the story, he saw us mortals living in the cold and darkness, so he stole fire from Mount Olympus and gave it to us.

Other versions have him literally molding the first humans from clay and water and breathing life into them.

That is such an awesome, cinematic image in my mind’s eye. I see him standing hunched in torrential rain by the side of a muddy riverbank somewhere in Greece. A giant feverishly at work, knowing that what he was doing was forbidden.

Often these stories are blended, giving Prometheus the role of both creator of humanity and also the one who gave us the tools to build civilization.

There he is, standing as lightning flashes amidst the downpour, and I’d like to think he paused for a moment just as he was about to finish. He thinks about the dangerous tool he is about to place in our hands, and then purposely neglects to give us the capacity to remember visceral pain for very long. This way we could be brave or naive or foolish. Maybe we must be all 3 so that we can take the fire he had given to us and actually use it. A tool that could kill us, such is its danger and potency! If we truly understood the depth of difficulty that comes with every endeavor we embark on, would we do anything at all? I am not so sure. Maybe it is good to be a Fool, because you’ll end up on a journey that will transform you.

I fundamentally believe that no life decision you make can ever be considered a mistake when viewed through this lens. Even and especially when things do not pan out how you would like. We’re just here to learn about ourselves, and how else are we supposed to do that?

You always have the option of viewing the difficult experiences in your life as a gift. You don’t have to, of course. It is extremely difficult to do this, it has to be said. I had a really hard time accepting what my life out here in the countryside looked like when the reality of how much work it would be finally dawned on me. Fixing broken pipes and cleaning roofs and shoveling gravel. This doesn’t look like what I thought it would. Buying and fixing up an old house comes with about 1,000 surprises and I couldn’t know what it would be like without going through the experience for myself.

For some reason, owning the things that happen in your life transforms how they feel. It makes it easier to pick yourself up and keep moving. I believe it’s because if you own it, and treat the challenges like gifts, you cease to treat yourself like a victim. Treating yourself like a victim to life is a disease.

I feel that, despite how challenging this last year has been, or perhaps more precisely because of how challenging this last year has been, this house has been a profound and transformative experience for me. It’s a little bit hard to explain this because it has been stressful and confusing and not exactly “fun” and yet it is helping me become the person that I want to be and therefore this is exactly what I want. I am learning to soften, to breathe, to not tense up and act out of fear in situations that feel uncomfortable.

Life is not happening to me, it is simply happening. And I am learning to actively engage in it and not run away from it. Because I want to be shaped by life. I want Life to reveal to me who I am, and this simply does not happen when everything is easy and comfortable and predictable. It also does not happen when you fight back or resist or panic or flee.

Mom spends very little time speaking about the pain of giving birth to me and a lot more time talking about how grateful she is to have gone through the experience. In her words: “I was so overwhelmed with the most amazing feelings that didn’t fit inside me.”

It makes me think that I am not transforming a house. A house is transforming me.

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1. Childbirth was the most intense physical pain she ever experienced but not the worst pain she ever felt. In her words: “the worst pain was feeling my moms hate towards me.”