Choose Your Pain

Choose Your Pain

“Growth is painful.
Change is painful.
Yet nothing is as painful as staying stuck Somewhere that you don’t belong.”
–Author Unknown

In this life, there will be pain.  Some of that pain will be unavoidable.  The loss of loved ones, tragic accidents and unforeseeable disasters are just part of living.  Other pain will be optional.  Being honest helps us to prevent the shame of being caught in a lie.  Acting in a timely manner helps to evade the pain of regret. Living a sedentary lifestyle avoids many physical pains, at least in the short term.  However, many life decisions carry pain on both sides.  Avoiding relationships can avert the pain of rejection but it can lead to the ache of loneliness and solitude.

So in reality, life is careful balance between the pursuit of pleasures and the avoidance of pains.  It is in pursuing this balance that we can fall into grave errors.  Too often, many of us avoid short term discomfort and thereby forego long term benefits.  Growth and change are positive actions that grant long term benefits.  However, growth and change usually involve some painful and unpleasant situations.  Looking back on honestly on our failures, mistakes and errors in order to understand them and learn from them is a very humbling and uneasy process.  However, failure to perform such reflection on our actions results in our suffering the repetition of these same behaviours an incurring the same agonizing results.

Likewise, our desire to maintain our comfort keeps us in places that eventually create anguish and distress.  Abuse of credit to keep a certain lifestyle will ultimately lead to a tormenting situation in the future.  Physically being sedentary is enjoyable for many years but eventually that lifestyle will lead to suffering and illness.  Our bodies were designed to be active and proper activity comes with some inconvenience and discomfort.  If we unwisely ignore the future results of our choices then our decisions to avoid pain or to pursue pleasure will end in unexpected sorrow.

So this is our daily challenge:  Choose your pain.  Accept that life will have some pain.  You cannot avoid it all.  Hedonism will ultimately have to pay the piper one day.  We cannot avoid paying the eventual cost for either our negligence or indulgence.  Pick your pain wisely.  Understand both the benefits and the cost – short term and long term.  Ask if what feels good now will hurt in the future.  Question if the pain that you are avoiding presently might have some ultimate benefit that you require.  Learn from the pain of that past and use that learning and experience to shrewdly pick your pains today so that tomorrow you might evade significant agonies and instead harvest the better pleasures that you so greatly desire.

“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
― William Goldman (“The Princess Bride”)

©2018 Scott D. Wilson