♕ |[41]|
ON PAIN
At home if I'd been asked to write an essay on pain, I think I would have started by looking for what other people have said about it, because we were always sort of taught that writing essays wasn't about saying what you think, but about proving that you knew what smarter people thought, what the accepted way of thinking about things was. Not everyone taught that way but most of them did, so most of the essays I've written in my life were just restating facts, quotes and sources; and I think that's most of why I can't remember many of them, because I didn't really say anything new or interesting in them. Not that I think I have anything new or even particularly interesting to say about pain, necessarily, but I can at least write what I think, because I don't really know what you want to read, so I'm not sure there's any point in trying to cater to it.
I guess in a place like this, maybe there are beings who don't and can't feel pain, who wouldn't understand the concept. I can't imagine what that would be like but I don't think I'd want to be that way- not because I like to hurt, but I can't see any way you could be immune to pain unless you couldn't feel other things too, and I think I'd rather have to hurt sometimes than never feel anything at all. I didn't always believe that, but I've been lucky enough to have the chance to learn better. I think, maybe, that's the worst part about pain-- if you're hurting long enough or badly enough you can forget everything else, you can start to believe that there's no way to make things better. And that's one of the worst things that can happen, letting yourself think that as long as it stops hurting the cost doesn't matter at all.
But it's not like there's an easy way to change that; and really I can't say I know what you should do in that kind of situation, only that giving up hope isn't the right choice to make, no matter how persuasive it seems at the time. Knowing things can change isn't the same as knowing how to change them. But I guess if it were easy to sort these things out, there wouldn't be stories with sad endings, and maybe we'd all be better off.
I try to believe that if we didn't hurt, if we weren't sad, if things didn't go horribly wrong sometimes, that we'd forget how good things are, we wouldn't appreciate being happy. I'm not sure if that's true, or even if I believe it; sometimes I think it's a silly justification. I'm not always great at being an optimist but after all... I think the effort's worth it.
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Reading pirate stories, I always wondered exactly what grog was. I think it's safe to say, it's pretty unpleasant. Um. I'd apologize for whatever I did this weekend but honestly, I don't think we were very effective pirates.
Only a few more days til my deal ends.