Pain

Don’t let the title turn you off. This won't be an angsty, weepy post, just some quotes I love from a book that I read a while back and tracked down again yesterday, mainly for one short chapter. The author is Nevada Barr, who mostly writes mysteries, but she’s also written this non-fiction book called Seeking Enlightenment Hat by Hat: A Skeptic’s Path to Religion.

Don’t let religion turn you off either, if it normally does. Barr's thoughts about pain, I think, have a pretty universal relevance.

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She starts with this:

"Somewhere along the line I got the impression pain was currency… I came into adulthood thinking that if I suffered enough, I could somehow get my own way; that pain could be exchanged for forgiveness, acceptance, success, or strength."

Or at least some knowledge and growth, right? (As if these things can't be achieved in other ways.) How do these beliefs affect our behavior? We hold onto resentments as if they can punish the person who hurt us. Also:

"A lot of us have allowed ourselves to become addicted to emotional, if not physical, pain. I remember an unfortunate woman I knew in Minnesota. In unkind moments, her friends would joke that when she introduced herself, she’d say: 'Hi, my name is Alison and I’m in pain.' There was some truth to the joke. She had come to hold pain as an important aspect of her personality; suffering as a replacement for real relationship to others or self.

Another woman of my acquaintance converted her pain into anger and used it to indicate she was not one of the common folk willing to turn a blind eye to the evils of the world, that, unlike us tawdry happy people, she was too good to settle for less."

Oh, I relate to both of those women, more than I want to admit!

Barr's beliefs about the value of pain started to shift when she quit taking the antidepressant medicine that had helped her. She'd felt ashamed to take it. Without it, though, she spiraled "down into the dark places," until she found herself desperately praying one night, "Dear God, what shall I do? Help me? What can I do?" The answer: "Take the damn medicine."

"I came to the conclusion that pain is nothing but pain, a cry from the body or the soul to be healed. Pain itself is merely an alarm bell set off to indicate all is not well, but, in and of itself, it has no value."

I've also heard it described as simply a sign that either something we need is missing or something we can't tolerate exists. In any case:

"When I am in pain it’s hard to be kind, generous, understanding, productive, giving. It’s all I can do just to keep my own head above water. Pain does not make me a better person; it makes me petty and crabby and selfish. And it makes me a liability to others."

She writes about how first responders like EMTs are taught that, before they can be most useful to others at an accident site, they need to ensure their own safety. The same is true on airplanes, where parents are told that, if the cabin loses air pressure, they should put on their own oxygen masks before helping their children. She concludes:

"I have come to believe that it is a duty to relieve our own pain."

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That's a very strong word, "duty." It's not a luxury but a DUTY to relieve our own pain, to the extent that we can, to best serve not only ourselves but also the rest of the world.

Of course, it's easier said than done. Our particular pain doesn't always have a medicine that's specially designed to treat it. And medicines—like all treatments—don't always work. No treatment can guarantee a life that's totally pain-free.

I'm sure that's not Barr's goal. She's just advocating a shift in our beliefs about pain. Yes, it can result in growth, but it can also grind us down, and growth can result from joy too. Pain has no inherent value. It's "nothing but pain": a part of life, not to be pushed away in horror, but also not to be embraced as something that defines who we are.