On pain & not knowing the answers
A seemingly lonely Jupiter in the night sky of 21st Nov 2022
I don’t have the answers. In fact, I don’t know a lot of things, how to walk the journey of life, how the world works, how to make sense of all the arbitrariness, how remarkable or inconsequential my life can be.
I suppose being alive does require being conscious most of the time: to be aware of the present, the sensations of the air we breathe in and the surfaces we touch, the feelings of loneliness, the joy little things can bring, the uncertainties of existence, how our trivial choices can affect the course of our ever ongoing adventure on this planet and also the pain we experience.
I have always been emotional, my undenied ability to feel happiness and sorrow to a great degree. It gave me the power to write, to create, to see the world in a different kind of beauty and brutality in a way that also broke me. Tying up my intestines and drowning me with the elixir of my lacrimal glands — the dominating feelings are defencelessness and resignation.
The simple way to cure or suppress these unwanted overflowing painful emotions can easily be drugs and alcohol. It is more comfortable to constantly nestle in the safe facade of feeling good compared to suffering in the bitterness of reality.
It is a no-brainer to be distracted, at least we are blissful! but for how long? the fragile and desperate body will only crave more and more till it cannot take it anymore. It will then break, becoming way more shattered than ever.
”..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon…”
“A gramme (of soma) is better than a damn”, wrote Aldous Huxley in his dystopian novel ‘Brave New World’. Soma is a drug that kills all sadness and worry, our lives could be pain-free! A condition which is putatively considered the best state one could ever live in. But is it really what we want?
A lot of the world’s greatest thinkers think otherwise, many believe pain is part of life’s meaning. Bloom wrote that humans willingly experience pain, anxiety, and struggle because we see value in chosen suffering while Frankl preached about the incompleteness of life without suffering and the meaning behind it.
I shall continually remind myself of the need to wholeheartedly feel the pains in life for my growth and betterment. This in turn allows me to be the master of my emotions while at the same time taking up the reins to control what is governable, which are — my thoughts & actions.
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