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

Ghosts of the Past

Ghosts of the Past©Scott D. Wilson 2015

"The best predictor of future behavior is relevant past behavior." — Dr. Phil

Well, it is 2015, a new year.  January is classically the time to reflect on the past and look towards the future.  I have quoted above the the popular maxim of television personality Doctor Phil McGraw.  From a straightforward context this statement seems completely sound.  Our past is usually a good way to forecast our future.  Generally this is true but specifically it can and will break down.  The burning question that arises from this adage is:  Does our past define us? Have our past choices locked us on a certain and inevitable course?

The answer depends fundamentally on how we view existence. If we are mere biological machines mindlessly reacting to the stimuli of our environment then we are certainly doomed to follow a hapless path of consequence and reaction till we die. Like a mechanical device, our behaviour would be governed by a set of rules, complex or otherwise, and so we would predictably follow a given path from birth to death based on action and reaction. This is the view of many scientists today. If this is so then we are all victims of circumstance and fate.  Our past has locked us on auto-pilot.

Indeed, many people do live predictable lives. They are puzzled by their own reactions and choices. They live many days but experience little difference and rarely learn from their own experiences or those of others.  These unfortunate folks follow life like a dream, letting it take them where it may, hoping that it does not become a nightmare and occasionally hoping they will wake up.  Doctor Phil is correct about such people. They definitely prove the adage about the past and reinforce the scientific view of causality.

Fortunately, there is much evidence to show that we each retain a powerful ability, and that is the option to choose. We always have the opportunity to choose a different path for our life. We can learn from our successes and failures, as well as those of others. With careful consideration we can opt to move away from the choices of the past and put into action different possibilities and open new unconsidered doors of opportunity.

Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith were drunks. Their past decisions had locked them into a wreckless addiction with alcohol. They were both on paths that would have brought sickness and ruin to their lives. Medicine had told them they would either die of alcoholism or become confined to an assylum. One day the two met, fell into conversation and became friends. Together they discovered a different path that changed their lives and ended their slavery to drink. Their choices created a new way for addicts and from their work, today we have Alcoholics Anonymous.

We do not need to be a slave to our past. The past may haunt us but it does not have the power to define us. We all hold the spark of creation within us. Our future is not built for us.  We can build something new today. We can make new pathways. We can say goodbye to our ghosts!

“My past has not defined me, destroyed me, deterred me, or defeated me; it has only strengthened me.”  ― Steve Maraboli