The point of pain

Pain is the main driving force for action, but often when the pain stops, so does the action. How might we remember pain for greater action? Or is there a better question to ask?

My wife, amongst other women, often jokes that until I am able to push a large watermelon out of my ass, or some other approximation of childbirth, I cannot truly know what real physical pain is.

She, and they, are right, of course.

I, nor any many, literally cannot imagine the pain of childbirth

It appears, on the outside, to be so ridiculously grievous, in a way so obscene, that you can’t help wondering why on earth any woman would ever choose to do it again.

But some woman do choose to do it again — some women choose to do it again and again — and they do so not just because their precious, miraculous newborn is worth it.

They do so because pain has no memory.

We might remember something of a feeling, even if it’s just a spectral shadow of the real feeling.

Times of great fear, moments of courage, the rush of jealousy and fleeting episodes of a host of other emotions all leave some stamp on our psyche. We can, if we just compel our minds to do it, recall something of great confidence even when our morale is at a low ebb.

We can be inflicted by trauma, and have that trauma rise up again at an innocuous trigger — a loud bang, say, or an unwelcome hand on a shoulder —but trauma is the debilitating and often recurring effect of the extreme emotions of painful moments, especially psychologically painful moments.

Trauma is the recurring emotions, not the recurring pain.

But pain itself, the acute physical manifestation, leaves no trace of memory.

“Within ten minutes, the pain was gone and I was overcome with what I can only describe as pure and unconditional love…”

When we feel pain, we are driven to immediate and imperative action to bring that pain to an end, to get rid of it.

The more acute the pain, the more violent the action.

This is, I think, a big part of the reason suicide seems so inexplicable to those left behind. It’s not just that those left behind don’t understand how a mind might act in this way. It’s because they — we — have never experienced what it is that pre-empts suicide: a wholly final and unbearable pain at the very center of one’s being.