Are you proud of your pain? Is it a secret you love to share? Has the tale of your torments become the central underpinning of your identity?

Sitting here, as the person responsible for typing out the questions above, I feel required to state that I can’t recall a single person I’ve ever known worth a damn who hadn’t suffered.

What I need right this moment is someone who can tell me the exact wording (and perhaps even who said it) of the quote that goes… ‘those whom the gods love they first test’… or something to that effect. But seeing as how they are not here right now, we’ll just muddle along without a sharp historical reference.

But it is true.

Pain tempers.
Pain refines.

I know that I haven’t the faintest idea where I would be if not for the fact that certain mythos-making occurrences happened to my person and forced me to re-evaluate everything that had felt so certain and sure right up to that particular point.

It’s a matter of perspective; the sun would not seem so heart-breakingly beautiful if it were not for the dark hours that came before. And that’s so easy to say.

Everyone who has ever told me the story of their pain has presented it as though it were the most heart-breaking thing that the world has ever seen. I’m as guilty of it as any other human out there; I walk the streets of my small town with this air of condescension born of the notion that I have endured things that these other mere mortals simply could not handle.

And in a sense, we’re all being honest. Because our pain, whatever the shades and varieties of circumstance which hold it, is the most heart-breaking thing we have ever seen.

I think what ultimately matters is what you do next, do you hold onto your pain as proof of the cruel twists of the world, as proof that god has it out for you, or do you hold onto your pain as proof of your ability to survive all matter of unfortunate obstacles, you are capable of transcending the troubles that the world will ultimately throw in your path.

I have met far too many people who have allowed themselves to be trapped in the time of their pain. By that I mean that their pain has led them to grab hold of some instant, some little, primarily irrelevant flashing of time-space experience and label that as their primary world experience. It tends to be either the moment of their most intense suffering or a time where they actually experienced something that they were willing to call joy. The peaks and pinnacles of human experience are many and multi-fold, but they are not the only thing that is occurring, and must be experienced simply as experiences, which serve only to temper the world-view that you must always be constructing.

Pain can teach us so very much, but if we let it, and only if we let it, it can also become the driving principle of our existence. It’s a difficult trap to dodge, because so many of the greats have suffered, so many of the greats can be viewed as having suffered through their human experience, almost from start to finish. The truly alarming thing is that this has only become more and more applicable as time marches inexorably on.

Sadly, I don’t know what it is that I’m ultimately driving at here. When I started, it was with an intriguing notion, one that came about after one of those conversational moments where the principle of youthful ‘angst’ came to be bandied about. My conversational foil (yes it was a real human being and not the wall as has been known to happen from time to time) was about to launch themselves into what I can only imagine would have been a bit of explanatory portraiture regarding their experiences with ‘angst’ at the age when the world just falls apart.

And then they stopped, and deferred to me, stating that from what they knew of my history, I was more entitled to the soap-box. Since I have a streak of quite eager ego in me, I’m writing this now.

I guess the point is that it isn’t how much or how terribly you’ve suffered.
It’s what you’ve done with that information, how do you use it to form the mythos of your life?

If I have any right to be on this damn soap-box that I seem to find myself on right about now, it’s because the sight of a fat winter squirrel staring at me on the bending branch of a bare bush is enough to make me stop and smile, and wonder.

It’s because, despite the various tics of a personality which leaves empty bottles and cigarette butts staggered across my environment, I have hope. It’s only because my pain is always in the process of finding perspective, it’s only because the curious events of childhood that were once held amongst histories greatest cataclysms are now seen simply as the impetus that helped me grow self-reflective, that urge that made me want to peel away the generally understood order. Pain made a philosopher out of me, but life’s too damn fun to let it rule you.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2006 at 1:32 pm and is filed under indiscriminate, philosophy, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.