“Don’t underestimate the power of pain. The power to bear pain without breaking is a strength people underestimate.  It isn’t the pain of other people that we are afraid of, it’s our own pain.”  XMen Days of Future Past.  Like we talked about yesterday—a stumble sometimes teaches us exactly what we need to know.  The break can be painful but it can also be exactly what we need.  Sometimes the things we hold up as sacred and precious are really just tools to get us where we want to be—they aren’t things we are meant to covet and repeat forever.  Whether it is a tradition we need to change or a physical thing we hold onto, it isn’t always true that we need to protect things.  All things end—that is the reality of life.  No matter what we do, none of us will make it out of here alive.  We are a species that fights for familiarity, for status quo more than it fights for the improvement of circumstances for all.  With that knowledge, I would think that we would constantly be participating in our own evolution.  Yet I am the first one who falls into maintaining tradition and I’ve held onto things long beyond their use.  There came a point in each circumstance that the struggle to hold on and keep things the same hurt more than the pain of letting go. 

Sometimes we need the pain to guide us toward what we are meant to do.  This was a tough lesson to swallow.  I craved familiarity at every turn, I wanted to show that I was capable of meeting the expectations of those around me, of keeping people happy.  For a long time I succeeded—no matter how much it hurt to let certain experiences pass me by, I held on and kept things going.  I also held on in circumstances where I saw the potential of something working out in a particular way.  I hoped it would be a certain way and I stuck around thinking it would eventually go the way I wanted it to.  The pain in that circumstance taught me that holding things for other people doesn’t guarantee they will be around to hold things for us, and frankly, there is a level of manipulation that comes with expecting people to behave a certain way because we did things for them.  With all that being said, we look at pain differently.  Pain is a teacher—we learn what works and what doesn’t work through pain.  We also learn that we can bear far more than we think we can.  The human spirit is resilient, so is the mind, so is the body.  That isn’t to say I advocate for pain, but it is to say that I don’t shy away from it any longer.

Gary Brecka says that aging is the active pursuit of comfort.  When we constantly seek to make things easy we lose the ability to adapt and create strength.  Pain has a purpose and we often avoid it because we think it will hurt.  Evolutionarily speaking it was also prudent to avoid pain because we didn’t want to risk dying or separating from the pack.  Now we avoid it because we equate pain with things like embarrassment.  All of that is temporary.  The more we can adapt and use pain as a tool, the faster we heal and move on.  The immediate reaction is that pain lasts forever and we can’t heal from it.  The reality is if we pull that band-aid off and face the fear, we see that it’s far less scary than we think.  The other reality is we put ourselves through far more pain than anyone else: we are our own worst critic, we fixate on mistakes, we worry constantly, we repeat errors over and over again in our minds.  If we let it happen, learn the lesson, then move on, the pain abates.  Don’t avoid it, learn to use it—even if it hurts, even if we are afraid, learn to accept pain as a key to moving on.  The future isn’t soft—but we are malleable.  Let the lessons shape our perceptions.