1.31.15

Of course, writing the above triggered a sharp crescent of pain just above my armpit, as it I'd been hit by a slingshot steel ball. One very neat spot. Almost clinical. And if I rearrange my arm, the pain retreats.

Until I reposition my arms and set to writing on my laptop. 

Pain free, until the next twinge, throb or searing ache.




With the exception of my left arm and shoulder and hand I am relatively pain free. 

At 59, I count that as a blessing. I am extremely lucky. I have somehow been spared the pain that fills so many people's lives. 

Normal aches and pains. Headaches. Backaches. Muscle spasms. 

Five sprained ankles. Tendinitis in the knee. Dislocated thumbs. Swollen knees. Second-degree burns. A concussion or two. The stuff one collects in space and time.




Pain is private. Hard to describe. Even harder to explain. 

How do you convince another of what you are feeling, especially in an age given to exaggeration, low tolerance, high expectations, an insistence that we can feel good all of the time? An age fraught with distractions and anodynes, pain killers and drugs and booze and faith that is reduced to new age crystals or crystal meth or evangelical promises that our sins and pains can be cleansed by revelation? Or that pain can be excoriated by acts of terror and counteracts of revenge? That we can erase pain from our existence by achievement. By an accumulation of a lifestyle. By walling ourselves away from the world.

It is, as I recall from my days among a college of behaviorists, a first person report. It cannot be observed. Thus it is unreliable. It is not quantifiable, measurable. 

Still, we have pain clinics. Copper bracelets, miracle healing waters, aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprphen, vicodin, oxycodone, muscle relaxers, emu oil, dream catchers, miracle juicers and bullet blenders that will wash away your pain and excess weight and toxins. 

And these are only for those physical ailments that drag us into private alleys of agony. 

There's no need here to explore the emotional or spiritual or emotion pain that fills so much of our lives.




Still, behaviorists will tell you that we can only observe pain as behavior. If that is so, are not many of us in agony? 






And what of empathy, literally "in" + "feeling": bringing inside ourselves the pain of others?