Life is Pain
An ancient chinese proverb says: “Life is pain. Pain makes you think. Thinking makes you wise. And wisdom makes life endurable.”
I find myself thinking back on how all of the hard lessons in life involve pain of some sort. Like when you are four and think you can fly so you jump off the top bunk, hit the dresser on the way down and realize perhaps humans cannot fly after all as you knock the wind out of yourself and slowly lose consciousness.
Or when you see that boy, the one you crushed so hard on, who told you he wanted you to be his girl always and forever, as he reached into your panties, is walking down the hall with his arm around another girl the very next week.
Or when you realize the ‘religion’ foisted on you as a child is nothing but a cult. So you gather the courage to leave your family and all your friends behind. A year later you see your father walking toward you in the mall and as you pass by he says nothing to you as if you were a complete stranger.
Or when you have to comfort your three young children through losing their father and all the while your own heart is breaking because you will never have the opportunity to make peace with him now. Those mornings where you would wake up and the grief would come flooding in and the reality of it felt like a weight that would crush you.
Or when your sister who you haven’t seen in years calls you up and asks to meet. And at the end of your visit says goodbye forever, because she chooses the safety of the cult-bubble over her own sister, despite how it protects people who do unspeakable things.
Or when you watch the person you love withdraw from you, bit by bit, until you feel so alone it is easier to be alone than feel invisible.
What did all this pain do for me? Did it make me think? I suppose I did. That box of journals I have are full of thoughts.
Did all of that thinking make me wise? I don’t think of myself as wise. But I did learn some lessons after all of that pain and reflection. But I think they are really the same conclusions that most people arrive at after having lived. I don’t think they are anything special or unique.
Life is fleeting and tomorrow is not guaranteed. So tell those people that mean something to you how you feel.
Let go of those people that cause you pain and don’t value what you have to add to the experience of life.
But forgive them for it – they are either too involved with themselves or their own pain to appreciate you. It really is not about you. You are beautiful, and perfectly imperfect. The right people will see and accept you for who you are.
You are so much stronger than you ever thought was possible.
Be open to all of the possibilities in life. Forget all those judgments about who you should and should not be, and follow your own path.
Live deliberately, as Thoreau said, so that when you come to die you do not discover that you have not lived.
Sir's submissive 