I’ve tried to understand why pain is continually a core part of my life, along with suffering, and I have attempted, without grace, to take an unbiased view on why this is. After a significant amount of digging, a lifetime of searching, I have found that pain causes movement. Pain causes a reaction. When someone twists your skin, or even simply harms you in some way, what do you do? You might just take it, but most get away from that pain; it stimulates movement. It is this stimulation that forces me in a direction. This doesn’t always mean forward, but it stops me from being still. The next layer beyond this is to find out why I wouldn’t want to be still, but that almost ensures that I come back to a lack of movement. Why wouldn’t I want a lack of movement, well of course, I want to move! This might bring us back to another very fundamental human need; to do. It doesn’t matter what is being done, we can convince ourselves that there is higher purpose and meaning, that’s fine, but in the end, we just need to do something. If we aren’t doing something, we’re bored; we’re going insane. For myself, I link this absence of doing with depression, the worst type of depression, the kind where you don’t do anything because there is no reason to do anything, and even deeper than that, no reason to be anything.
If the most difficult thing is a phase change, going from one state to the next, then this would explain why I continually put myself in a state of feeling pain. In the context of a human being, a phase change is really just the distance between being or doing at least two things. To be a human, well, you have to be alive, and I’m alive, and you’re alive, and we have certain things we’re willing to adapt to, learn, become, and in the end, do. If a lack of pain is then a lack of movement, then if I’m being still, I slowly become nothing, and I wonder why I must live. I know I’m not the only one who has experienced something like this, but the most curious thing is that I am unwilling to give up. I think it comes down to my stubbornness, I am unwilling to change. This change obviously being one from life to death. The means to stopping myself from making this transition is through pain.
The same cannot be done with happiness or feeling good. When you feel good, what do you do? Well, you’re probably pretty content with yourself, so you sit still. No, I don’t mean literally sit still, but that is metaphorically true. It means you stick with whatever is, and that’s that, because if it felt bad, you wouldn’t need to move away from it. If it feels good, you might sink more into it, but that sinking motion is as you’d imagine; quicksand. As we’ve already seen, I’m at my worst when in such a state. When lacking motion, I am depressed, and if left there for long enough, I might wonder why I would ever want to leave it; why I have to experience the stillness in the first place. This then leads to me pondering a means of escape.
This might all sound a bit masochistic, and maybe it is, but that’s not how I want to view it. I’m not experiencing or feeling pleasure as a result of the pain. The pain is a reminder that I am alive, and it forces me to continually stay alive. Without the pain, I immediately want to sink back into the pool of nothingness. Maybe deep down that’s really what I want, but like said already, I’m unwilling to change, at least for the moment, and others don’t want that either, it seems. I think it would be only fair to analyze and make mention of at least a few things I do to cause me pain, and then view the things outside of my control which also cause pain.
There is some inherent pain with creation, at least in my experience. I feel a strain when writing these words, thinking about what I want to say, how to say it, how it might be interpreted, and how to avoid sounding too same-y. I think about the words themselves more than this, and there are of course the subconscious choices being made of how to say a thing, and then correcting that later. Even avoiding the action at hand, there is also all the time spent thinking about the action. Thinking about writing, thinking about what to write, what I’m failing to write about, how I could write better, and so on. It all eats and gnaws away at whatever is left of my mind. I haven’t drawn in ages, but it was much of the same strain, just at a more rudimentary or basic level. Pain felt from literal wrist pain all the way to being able to grasp proper perspective and execute that on the paper.
I wouldn’t want to include something like music in this case, as I have not made music, nor have I attempted to. At most, I have thought about it little bit, not about what I wanted, but about what could be done, and then recorded that here and there. Along with that, I have found myself sometimes recording a little playing around without much intention. These things, I wouldn’t assign the same label as “creation” as I might apply it to writing, but you could say that something is being created, although this goes to show two things. How I view music and how I view creation. In my mind, creation must have some amount of intent, or quality, or something along the lines of finalization, and because I fail to meet those criteria, I’m unwilling to call it creation. There is also the truth in my fear of feeling, and music can force you feel, whether you like it or not, and because of that, I actively avoid learning how to make music. That’s a lot of words, but I need to get to the pain part.
There is both physical and mental pain, but at times, one has more precedence over the other. The mental pain mostly has to do with thinking about the choices available, the relationships between those choices, and the new relationships available once a choice has been made. Keeping track of this can be tiring, and doing it quickly is even more tiring. However, there are times where I can do this with some level of competency, but the next level is assessing what relationships, or paths, I want to go down. With so many choices, I have to assess what I want, and then execute that want, and think about what I want next, while remembering where I came from and where I’m going next. This is mentally hard work, at least it is for me, at the level I’m at.
That mental pain differs in quality and quantity depending on the instrument as well. Guitar offers more choices, and so, like you’d imagine, is more difficult mentally than something like bass. Bass has been a lot easier than guitar when considering choices, but on top of that, based on how you use the instrument, you are making even less choices than are available to you. This has given me a little more control with bass, but nonetheless, that control is incredibly limited. With piano, there are a lot of easily executable choices, but it comes down to being able to find and execute a choice, with agility and grace, and maintaining and increasing the complexity of the series of choices. With piano, more than bass or guitar anyway, there is a unique, probably beginner, mental-physical link.
With guitar or bass, you’re making choices with your left hand, the right hand is executing those choices. Much like an officer commanding his minions. With piano, you’re making choices with both hands, or so I would expect you to. There is then this link between having both hands do what you want, physically, which ends up feeling like a mental strain, but also, you have to make choices with both hands. Generally, you can influence one hand to follow the other, and that’s how I view music, and what tends to be easiest way to capture the two-handedness. There is some sort of pattern which allows there to be a feeling or sense of order that can allow one body part to do one thing while the other is off doing something else. Yes, literally they are moving different ways, but they are working towards the same goal. Well, I say all of this because it hurts to do this properly. Mentally, it hurts like hell, and physically, it gets straining after some period of time, the quantity of which I don’t even know with complete certainty.
For the most part, the mental pain outweighs the physical pain. There are some good questions to ask in response to my reasoning as to the justification, or reasoning, of this pain. One simple one is: “Why don’t you exercise, then?” If I want pain, that would be a sure-forward path, I would get the pain I want, and for some time, I did. I lifted, but didn’t work on cardio. I might have received pain from it, but why give it up, then? Well, it didn’t work. I don’t know why, but it didn’t. However, when I’m mentally tearing, it works. The physical pain I feel, as a result of my actions, mind you, is always minimal, usually dealing with my hands or wrists, at most. Not much pain versus pushing your body to its limits. This mental pain versus physical pain can actually link us back to pain that’s outside of my control; my body.
We might now be thinking about pain a little more abstractly. When I say pain in reference to my body, I’m not talking about pain in the same way you feel a cut or a needle. I’m talking about how I perceive the body, what my body has, and what it lacks. This, in a sense, causes me pain. We might have the ability to rewrite a lot of our minds, but this, it seems, I am unable to “fix.” I can’t stop feeling this way, no matter how hard I try, and I can get distracted, but when I fail to feel that distraction, I’m right back at it. How does this make me move forward? Well, I’m a human being, I want to either solve the problem or soothe the wound. The means to doing either of those things requires movement, and even if this is ever “solved,” I then have to continually take care of it, and the means of doing that are actions that cause me pain.
I’m always wrapping things back around to cycles because I find them to be fundamental, but I’m sure you knew that already. You can probably see how this is a cycle as well. You cause the pain to create the movement, the movement which then both works to tend to the wound with one hand and then cutting with the other. I’m always in a state of tending to wounds that are always being created. As long as there is pain, there is something to peer into, acknowledge, and learn. You want to know why you feel the pain, and you’ll do everything you can to find out why that is. By trying to find out why you feel the pain, or what is causing the pain, you thereby are causing yourself more pain. All actions are painful; to act is to experience pain. I don’t mean to say this happens the same for everyone, but for me, this is much of how it works.
If this is a fundamental system of my functioning, how do we assess when I’ve gone too far? Well, it’s only seen after I’ve gone over the limit. I push too far, I cause too much pain, and instead of moving, I stop and start to take it. I keep causing injuries, but they stay there, and there’s no one to tend to them. This well, yes, is the problem that I’m actively experiencing. I can only cause movement by causing pain, or so, I believe this is the case. It takes effort and energy to tend to wounds, and you receive energy by resting enough, and well, I think there’s a natural timer for some things. A natural timeout between doing one thing and another. If I can’t tend to the wounds, and I can’t cause the wounds, what do you think happens? Nothing happens, yes, very wise observation. This almost sounds like another cycle, another cycle simply one layer deeper.
Limits can be broken, just like how you can push your body to do much more than it tells you it can handle. The mind isn’t so dissimilar. It might beg you to stop, say it can’t move, beg to stop moving, but movement can still occur. The blacksmith hammering away at his work isn’t concerned about how his body feels, the sweat dripping down his neck; he’s concerned with his work, and everything else can be ignored. If so desired, he could push to the point where he ignores what his body begs for. It could beg for him to stop, but if he believes there is a point or reason to all that hammering, he will. The point is: to hammer is to live, and if he doesn’t hammer, then he dies. It might cost him other things, he might be hurting himself, pushing too far, pushing beyond what he knows is acceptable, and then continually doing so, but if he doesn’t know what else to do, could you blame him? I know I couldn’t.
It might end all the same way, yes, whether you hammer or not there will be a point reached in which that’s no longer possible. A broken machine, instead of stopping and cooling down, will hammer and hammer on even harder, faster, which, usually anyway, causes it to stop working. I’m not a machine though, I’m a person, and I can force myself to continue hammering, but it comes at a cost. In a sense, I’m a broken machine, and because I have the ability to reason and rationalize, those abilities have caused me to believe that the best thing I can do is push my limits, ignore the wounds, and move forward no matter what. The problems are all the blood I’m losing, the inability to feel my body, and the slowing and finally ending of my movements. This might sound destructive, and maybe it is, but when isn’t there destruction at the cost of construction? There are always things that must be destroyed in order for other things to be constructed.
To cut the tree, to mine in the mines, to move the supplies; someone and something has to do this. We destroy in order to reconstruct and build elsewhere. This might be a scary thing, and it might damage things in the long-run, but we don’t know better, or we’re unwilling to acknowledge the damage caused. If it works, we continue doing it, and continue ramping up the quantity of the action. If doesn’t, we take a step back and find another approach. In this case, I have no other approaches. I want it all to burn, I want to tear it all apart; nothing should be left. This isn’t a wish to die, but instead, a wish to be reborn. If I couldn’t be born what was right the first time, then maybe, just possibly, a second time would do the trick. Is it destructive or is it all that can possibly be created at this point?
I must feel pain, while at the same time, I need to cool down and get away from that pain. To properly fix things, to heal the open wounds, is an unlikely feat. I need the pain to move, and if I don’t move, I want to never think about moving, or ever be moving, again. I inflict this pain myself, along with factors outside of my control causing me pain, which causes movement, but that movement isn’t always available. Energy is required for movement, and rest is needed to replenish that energy. A vicious cycle is then created. To fully heal, and then inflict smaller wounds, is not an option. In order to stop that cycle, limits must be broken, and any systems saying that I have gone too far have to be ignored. Pain will continue to be a fundamental part of my life; being the force to move me, not necessarily forward, but anywhere from the quicksand. I don’t want to be in the quicksand.