Pain Is Learning

we're drowning in the trenches
we're choking on our indecision
is this pain we're feeling worth it
am i learning from anything at all?

sometimes i wonder if it were only easier
if i could let the currents drag me under
and take me out to the sparkling silver rivers
that lie just past the world i am not.

if pain were the only reminder in a world of chaos to do right by one's self and others, would we even pay attention? is pain anything? can it be nothing?

I sat at my computer earlier today having a virtual conversation with a virtual friend. I call him that simply because that is what he is to me now. He's a bunch of words appearing on a computer screen because he refuses to come to life for me, in every sense of the word. Come to think of it he always did refuse. I'm not sure when he died inside, but the funeral has long since been conducted and I am the sole survivor mourning the loss. There is so much pain inside of him that it radiates from his every touch, look, even typed word. He is, in every essence, pain. It's all he knows. It's all he'll let himself become now. It didn't used to bother me, it didn't used to literally hurt me, but today, for the first time, it did. This got me thinking because the way i have been taught pain is a lesson, something that needs to be learned.

Think about it, we've been taught this way since the very day we were born. When we did something wrong we were slapped on the bottom or wrist. The pain taught us not to act up. Growing out of my toddler days I had quite a large problem with sucking my thumb. One day i was playing and fell and scraped up my entire thumb leaving it bloody and scabbed. Later that same day I stuck my thumb in my mouth because it was my routine and screamed in pain. I never sucked my thumb again. The pain taught me that I shouldn't. Later my mother had a problem with my brother and I jumping on the bed. It didn't matter how many times I was scolded, I didn't listen. Not until I was jumping on the bed and fell off and cut my face up on the window ledge did I learn not to do it. I could go on and on with these examples, the point is that pain is the greatest teacher in a human's life. We don't like to hurt, or should I say, we shouldn't. It teaches us to be careful, to be smart, to do the right thing.

It's not only physical either. The mental pains are probably the worst. The problem is that they can be deceiving as well. Emotional pain cuts to the very heart of everything we are, to be human is to have emotions, and to have those emotions pained is cataclysmic. It alters us, changes us deep inside.