Taking Pains

The human being, the human mind and the human spirit are repositories for pain.

We carry our pains with us like internal scars, like the rings of a tree recording when we have suffered each blight, or fallow year, or ten.

Some of those pains have been thrust upon you, delivered by people who don't care.

Don't care whether you live or die.

They do care about something of course. They care about their own personal impact on their own personal world. They care about their visibility. Causing pain to others reminds them they are alive, and those closest are ground zero. They may exercise their freedoms by damaging you, in the way that teenage lovers might use a pen knife to tattoo a 100-year-old oak. 

You are simply an object - a dispensable process in their coping strategy.

Perhaps at the end of an e-mail or text. A nasty word. A jibe more cruel than the sword. 

Anybody can press the trigger on an enemy they can't see.

Anybody can shoot a Space Invader. 

Anybody with 20p can point a Glock at a Galaxian.

Pain ebbs and leaks. It flows through the cracks like poison. It makes people react with the most unruly, least tempered parts of themselves.

The challenge is to mitigate this with a counter strategy.

When you claim to notice a model like this you hope it has some sort of descriptive merit, that your theory, idea or model has validity. That it may allow some new understanding. Understanding in turn might allows rationalisation and compartmentalisation which helps some personality types (but not very stupid people) cope.

In other words you begin to know what part of your brain to store these pains in and make a note of how frequently you should or (preferably) shouldn't visit.

People with enough emotional intelligence and imagination might find some value in it.

But the pain doesn't really go away, it just becomes part of the tapestry of your life, hopefully contributing to the context of better judgements and decision-making.

Our soap operas and scummy chat shows involve rash of people who give away their pain.

They give it to others.

They punish. To feel better about themselves.

These sort of people should perhaps go down the local soup kitchen and give something of themselves in order to receive and abate. De-prioritise the self as a neo-analgesic.

Some bottle it up. But pain is a yeast. It can break a glass container from the inside out. It needs a pressure valve. 

Ultimately, we all have to carry our pains around with us.

They survive in us until we die, either naturally or because we can't stand it any more.

How often we visit our pains decides our overall happiness, because regular visits make the memory fresh, new and bright. 

And these are bright crimsons, not bright yellows. 

All too frequently, these visits are toxic.

But the pain can be genetically altered before it's given away.

It can be tempered and planished and polished into something approaching good advice.

It can be shared over a pint, or a laugh.

And when we die, our lifetime of pains finally goes away.

It dies with us.

Only it doesn't. 

In the process we make new pains for others.

Pain breeds.

Pain replicates.

Pain breathes.

Pain is a survivor.

It deserves your deepest disregard.