“Out of the Pain”

“Some people don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain.”

We have tolerances for pain and tolerances for damage. Fire will inflict pain before it inflicts damage to most people, most of the time – and mostly, that’s how we want it. If fire did damage to you before it hurt you, we’d have all burned up long ago.

But pain is a powerful motivator. So powerful, in fact, that we sometimes need to shut it down (or at least, lessen it) to do something which will damage us – but which must be done. I don’t want to be a slave to my “pain/damage” index if my child is in a burning building. I need to be able to take some damage to accomplish a goal.

That’s a button that can break easily. If we push our pain down below our damage too often, we can permanently cross the wires. This is especially true for non-physical pain. Sometimes something hurts us emotionally very badly, but we push past it to accomplish something. Maybe we do that one too many times, and we lose the sense to come in out of the rain.

Pain of all kinds is an early warning system. We need to push past it sometimes, but honestly we should listen to it more often. You can be out in the pain so long that you forget how to come back out of it.