The "Problem" of Pain

I remember moving to Michigan a decade and a half ago and instantly falling in love with the game of hockey. All the kids in my neighborhood played religiously and I knew if I ever wanted to make friends I had to find a pair of skates and a stick.

Now, I was an insecure, chunky 6th grade kid who desperately wanted to make friends. (As opposed to an insecure, slightly less chunky 28 year old who still desperately wants to make friends. I've come a long way.) But learning how to play hockey is HARD. I can't tell you how many times I have fallen flat on my ass in the most embarrassing of ways. Also not helpful to the aforementioned 6th grader. He got made fun of a decent amount for all of his blunders. (Think of "Smalls" from the movie "The Sandlot" but fatter..... and not as smart.) I fell. It hurt.

Learning how to play hockey is quite the endeavor. It requires you to do so many different and disparate things at the same time. Its not always possible to teach or coach the amount of coordination needed to play, so in the end the best way to learn is by doing. The problem with learning by doing is that we fail when we try something new. We fall.

I think life is like hockey. (I know an absolutely brilliant and trenchant insight. I can taste the Pulitzer now.) When we are engaged and living our lives, pain is just unavoidable. We fall. It hurts. Sometimes, badly. I will say it this way, "Life is about getting hurt." We get hurt and then you recover, and then guess what? Odds are pretty damn high you get hurt again. But hopefully, we learn something from it.

For having lived nearly all of my life in the strangling clutches of the monster known as "Suburbatron", I feel like I have seen my fair share of pain in my life, and crap are there a ton of varieties. Its like walking into a Baskin Robbins. (Get it? 31 flavors.)

There is that cold, empty pain of leaving behind the known and stepping into the unknown. (Graduation, new job away from home.) There is the "Tornado Pain" of watching life upend all of my careful and meticulous plans.There are those sharp, stabbing pains that persist when I experience some failures, and their equally evil twin that comes when success doesn't bring me what I hoped. There are also the "Freddy Krueger" pains that come and shred everything I have ever hoped for apart. There is the beautiful pain of finding people I love and who love me and then walking with them and sharing their pain. Empathy.

When I am lucky I even get to experience the searing pain of being in a moment of pure triumph or utter perfection which I know can't possibly last, but will stay with me until the end of time.

You see, I have developed the habit of being down on pain. I want pain to stop. I want to ignore it. I want it to go away. However, in my lamenting I forget a fundamental aspect of pain. Pain lets me know that I am still alive. That I'm not dead. Pain moves me, teaches me, changes me, and reminds me that my heart still beats. Pain is good.

I want to be able embrace pain. I want to remember that pain is good not only in the wake of life's upending moments, but when I am in the throes of those times. I want to be able to trust completely that I am in the loving embrace of God at all times. Even when I hurt the most.

I know that this long winded pontification is incredibly deep, and maybe even changed your life forever. What can I say, I am brilliant. <======(This statement is clearly sarcasm. I know what this post is. Narcissistic claptrap. Like I have any of this figured out.)