Push through the Pain

As I've stated before, I'm no athlete. Never was, never will be. I have not, however, been exempt from athletic endeavors over the years, either by coercion or misguided attempts to stray from my natural path. So I have been on the recieving end of exhortions to: 

"Push through the pain!"                                                          "No pain, no gain!"

Not being a fan of pain either, this never made any sense to me. As far as I could see, pain was a big, red STOP sign, to be ignored at one's peril. Perhaps, in our more enlightened age, these urgings to brush aside body cues are not as prevelant as they once were, but I don't imagine they've disappeared ----- not by a long shot.

For folks like me, who were looking for a good reason to be sidelined in the first place, pain seemed a logical stopping point. 

"It hurts. I quit." 

"I'll just sit over here and watch . . . or read my book . . . or write a poem . . . or hum to myself . . . or talk to my equally sports-challenged friend."

"I'll just stroll around the track and stop to pick some flowers to make a necklace and look for four-leaf clovers. Ya'll go right on ahead with your game. I'm fine."

Of course, there are other kinds of pain. 

It seems that my pain specialty is internal. I've been pretty lucky about injuries and illnesses --- I haven't had too many. But ask me about depression. Or addiction. Or relentlessly poor self-esteem. Therapists were invented just for me.

I don't actually think I have a lot more psychological angst than many other people. I simply seem wired to be more aware of it ---- and fascinated by it. You know how sports enthusiasts collect statistics about their favorite games and players? Sometimes they can recount, in painful detail, every play from a game fifteen years earlier. That's how I am with therapy.

I have kept a journal for more than fifty years. One would think that it would contain all sorts of interesting tidbits about life in the 'olden days'. Fifty years is a long time. Some of you don't even remember when gas was 20 cents a gallon and candy bars were a nickel. But my journals are not troves of obscure facts about life in Europe in the Sixties, or groovin' through the Seventies. They're me, processing, long before I knew the word or its meaning. Me, figuring out life, or bitching about life, or thinking about thinking and feeling. As a record of the times, even the major events of my own, they're pretty much a bust. But they trace emotional ups and downs with excruciating attention.

I have been endlessly curious about, not just my own interior life, but other people's as well. I want to know what makes people act the way they do. I read terrible news clippings and try to imagine what was going through the minds of the people involved. I take something I've done or said, and try to roll it back, unravel it, looking for antecedents, try to predict outcomes. People say I listen well, and that's probably true, because I'm forever in search of answers. I've never understood the folks who espouse "Ignorance is bliss" as a philosophy of life.

So yes, I look to the past, especially my own past. I watch for patterns, unpack delusional thinking, confront painful illusions. I do it on my own and with professional help. I do it, when necessary, with friends and especially with my wife, Jill. Because if I don't go through the pain of this sort of growth, I'll be doomed to tread the same turf over and over, and that, my friends, really is painful.