Pain Vs. Pain....

Why I love to ride…I think! Tonight the topic of thought was pain. Physical vs. Emotional.

The brain does not REMEMBER physical pain. If it did, mothers would rarely have a 2nd child! I have been hurt in magnificent ways several times in my life, including being on a machine that blew up launching me into the air, dislocated my shoulder and tearing my lower back muscles so badly it was weeks before the muscle spasm’s subsided. And I don’t remember any of the pain! I have residual pain from it as a reminder that I am MORTAL, but don’t remember the pain.

However, EMOTIONAL pain, childhood and otherwise can devastate a person, if NOT put into context and dealt with properly!

I still remember the very first time I had my Heart just crushed! And the last time by the way, and it’s really hard to differentiate between the memories of the two. Even though they are separated by 40+ years of life and various other events and painful experiences, there is little difference in the memory of the events. I read a book by C.S. Lewis, several times actually, titled “The Gift of Pain.” What? Pain a gift? Pain is a magnificent gift from God! If we grow up with NO pain, we are less able to deal with pain yet to come! Children coddled and protected simply are not emotionally or physically equipped to deal with the inevitable pain to come in life! Emotional pain, from my experience is exactly the same! If never experienced early in life, DEVASTATING later in life! If NOT learned from early in life, we are doomed to repeat mistakes, and the subsequent pain. Perhaps the pain we experience emotionally is so easily recalled because it is a necessary part of our psyche, in that it is accumulative. Kind of like going to school and LEARNING! Memorizing facts and data that is critical to job or life’s performance if you will. If you forget, then you will have to learn, and re-learn that same lesson, over and over again! Like going back to school doomed to repeat the 9th grade forever!

Maybe the best we can aspire to is to smile through the pain! And recognize it for the magnificent gift it is, and look forward to the day we can look back, and see the stepping stones of life scattered behind us, and see the pain stones beautifully placed between the stones of a both joyfull and mundane life. The vacillation of joy and agony interspersed with lovely remembrances of our ultimate gift from God. Our ability to Feel and remember something that matters.

As we end this life, and walk toward that light before us, perhaps we will have the one last chance to turn and look back, and see as we enter eternity with our creator, just how wonderful a gift life and it’s pain was, and how it both pales with, and prepares us for our next walk, into Eternity.