IHT Ep 008 Pain 

Arraignment

In February of this year, I took my kids to a trampoline park. It was a pretty good one. There was a dodge-ball trampoline gym, a climbing wall, an obstacle course, and this cool trampoline wall where you could hurl yourself at the wall and spring back out over a sea of other trampolines. But my favorites were the high-jump trampolines where you could bounce up and scramble onto these decks set up at different heights, some as high as my head. 

I was doing some epic trampoline box jumps onto one of the lower decks when something suddenly changed. Looking back, I’m not really sure how to describe it. There was this pain in my left buttock and hip like something inside had just twisted itself in a knot and a weird stiffness in my left leg. I took a little break and tried to walk it off. After ten or fifteen minutes, I made a couple of half-hearted bounce attempts but it was clear that somehow, something was wrong. 

I love athletic stuff, love the challenge of getting right up to the limits of what my body can do, so I’ve had my share of strained muscles. And, usually, after a few days of rest, I’ve found that the best thing to do is just to keep moving, gently of course, through the discomfort. 

But something was different this time. Over the next few days, the pain got worse. It spread down my leg. I stopped being able to exercise. I stopped being able to run. I couldn’t bend to touch my toes. I couldn’t sit in a chair. Then my foot went numb. By the time I got an appointment with an orthopedist, I could barely walk. 

It took a week to get that appointment, but when I finally got there, she diagnosed me in a matter of minutes … an L5-S1 radiculopathy. In layman’s terms that’s damage to the nerve running down the outside of my leg. An MRI would later confirm that that damage was caused when the cushiony disc in between my two of my vertebrae broke and the jelly-like stuff inside it squished out and clamped down on that nerve root, what people call a slipped disc.  

 I have been lucky. I have seldom had debilitating pains. But what I experienced over the next month was some of the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. I went for over almost two weeks without sleeping. One morning my family found me hunched over the couch weeping and unable to move. I almost never even take Ibuprofen, but that month I took the kind of pain meds that they come with warning about addiction. 

I know that pain can get a lot worse than what I felt, and that there are plenty of other people who live every day with pain that dwarfs what I experienced. But I must very humbly say that that pain totally kicked my ass. 

Pain is a weird thing. And the thing that most struck me about it wasn’t what I expected. It was not just how hard it was to endure, how unstoppable it was, how it totally controlled my attention. What really struck me was how lonely it was. Even with a loving family there to support me every day, I was still utterly alone with my pain. Even friends who knew about my ordeal asked how I was, they couldn’t see my pain. They couldn’t experience it. And even if they could, their pain wouldn’t be mine.  

Arraignment 

Even now, five months into my recovery, my radiculopathy is painful every day. So, needless to say, I’ve been thinking about pain a lot. I wonder about how to live with it, how to be wise about it, if that’s even possible. 

Is there some use for all this pain? Or, maybe not use, that’s not it. Maybe, what I’m trying to ask is whether there are hidden gifts in this pain that might somehow make it mean something more than just suffering … Is there maybe even some reason to be thankful for it? And if there is, can I find it in myself to be grateful? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but when you’re the host of a podcast about unexpected gratitudes, it seems like it’s at least worth a try. So today, we’re putting pain itself on trial. Its crime … not just making life unbearable, not just harming the innocent without cause or reason, but harm without meaning. Can pain itself be redeemed somehow for being the root of all human misery. 

Stay tuned. 

Opening Statements: The Defense

May it please the court, we’re going to start this trial a bit unconventionally. We’re going to start with opening arguments for the defense. Gentlefolk of the jury, I offer you three compelling lines of reasoning that have given solace to the wretched for thousands of years.  

Exhibit A: On a physical level, pain keeps us from hurting ourselves more when we’ve already been injured. It slows us down. It forces us to be gentle and careful with ourselves. It insistently and unignorably elevates our own self-care as a priority. And, for those of us who find it difficult to accept the care and help of others, pain gives us permission to give ourselves permission to let other people help us. 

Exhibit B: It could be that pain is smithy that forges a more refined soul. Maybe pain makes us more empathic, more compassionate. Maybe it makes us stronger. St. Paul writes, in an oft-quoted verse in his letter to the Romans, that “We boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”

Exhibit C: But, most convincingly, pain is a necessary antonym to pleasure and that without suffering we’d not be able to experience happiness. Indeed, without it, how would we even know what suffering was.  

The only fair verdict in this trial is ‘not guilty’. 

Opening Statement: The Prosecution

The prosecution would like to start by saying. I’ve turned to ideas like this myself when trying to navigate the tangled labyrinth of my own pain. At times, they’ve offered real comfort. But here’s the thing, as someone who is experiencing pain right now, instead of just sitting in the philosopher’s tower thinking about it … I call bullshit. 

I am not thankful for pain. I love the poetry of that Saint Paul quote, but its logic escapes me. How exactly is my pain “producing character.” I can tell you for a fact that radiculopathy has not left me stronger. And I think it’d be insulting to suggest that this is true to someone suffering from MS or whose pain has been a contributing factor to addiction. Pain is not alchemy. That whole marine thing about “Pain is just weakness leaving the body.” That’s a lie. 

And the idea that suffering is necessary for happiness smells of bullshit too. There have been long periods of my life that were downright joyful where I didn’t have so much as a stubbed toe. As John Green, who often and insightfully writes about pain, puts it, “the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.”   

Pain is not teaching you a lesson. Nor do I believe that my pain is part of some scheme concocted by a cosmic intelligence.  

As far I can see, pain is just pain. And it sucks. 

First Witness: Buddhism

So much ink has been spilt on this topic that it’s hard to tell where to start. So then what? If you’ve listened to even one episode of the I Heart This podcast, you know what the deal is. We’re supposed to take something underappreciated and reveal its underlying awesomeness. But I don’t think I can just do that here, not honestly anyway. If this podcast is supposed to be a ‘thank you’ note to the universe, then what is there to be thankful for? I’m still not sure. 

And when I’m not sure about something, I go to the library. It’s a reflex. I just can’t help it. And so, for my first witness in this case, I’d like to call an expert whose testimony on pain and suffering fills shelf upon shelf at my local library, one that has offered counsel not just to me but to millions of people worldwide, someone whose work is almost entirely concerned with pain and suffering. Your honor, I’d like to call Buddhism to the stand. 

According to legend, Prince Siddhartha started down the path of Buddhism when he snuck out the palace where his dad kept him sheltered from all pain and was horrified to find people growing old, getting hurt, getting sick, and dying and spent the rest of his young life trying to find a way to get free of suffering. Obviously, I’m glossing over an entire world religion here, but the philosophy he came up with basically boils down to this. One–“There’s no escape; Life is full of suffering,” and two–”We suffer because we desire.” We want some things, and we want other things to go away. Things like pain. These seem like pretty rock-solid points to me. And Buddha’s solution based on this? “If you don’t want to suffer, you have to stop desiring.” If you can somehow stop wanting all the things, then it won’t bother you not to have them. If you can stop pushing all the pain away, then it just becomes another experience. Buddhism argues that pain and suffering are not the same thing–and that while pain is inevitable, suffering is not. That suffering is under our influence. That it is us who give pain the power to really harm. And if that’s true, pain is not the criminal here. 

Your witness. 

Your honor, I agree with this in principle. But I think we’ve got to be careful with the Instagram tl;dr on Buddhism that the defense has presented here.

If, as the first noble truth proclaims, life really is shit; if the world really is an unavoidable pain-fest, does that make  the whole enterprise of “I Heart This” misguided? Is all of this gratitude, really just toxic positivity, so much Pollyanna-ing. Are we just painting the garbage with stars and unicorns?  

And is detachment from pain really something to be commended. Is it really the right way to go? Imagine that you’re walking along the road and you see a horrible car accident, and as you approach the scene, you come across the passengers. Some are dying. Some are horribly injured. “What are you going to do? Smile beatifically down at them thinking of how they wouldn’t be suffering if they weren’t clinging so strongly to life? NO! Of course, not. It is right. It is human for our hearts to be involved, to be sad, to be afraid, to want to live, to not want the sick and the injured friends to die. 

I want to desire. I want to fall in love, even when it causes sleeplessness, loss of appetite, and the endless repetitive nagging thought-spiral of wondering whether she loves me back. I wouldn’t give that up even for a life of guaranteed happiness. 

Look, I’m not saying that pushing my pain away isn’t causing me to suffer. I know it is. And I’m not arguing that I wouldn’t be freer if I could loosen my grip … if I could just let my pain be. I know that that’s true. But it is really, really hard to just sit with pain. I’m not sure it’s even always possible. Are you really suggesting that my suffering is my fault? That the blame lies with the victim? 

To be clear, I don’t think this is what Buddhism suggests. But I think we’ve got to be careful bandying about memes that tell us that “Suffering is optional.”  

Suffering is not a character flaw.  

Second Witness Personal Experience 

The greatest pain of my life wasn’t physical. I guess for most people that is true. 

It happened when I was a senior in college on an internship at a wilderness survival “school.” That might sound like a strange college internship to you, and you’d definitely be right. But at the time, I wanted nothing more than to be someone who could live in the wilderness with nothing but my knife. The central irony here is that this quest led me to spend an entire semester about a thousand miles away from everyone I loved, no phones, no emails, not even regular mail delivery … and it was that loneliness that tore me into pieces. Sure there were complicating factors. The guy I worked for was passive-aggressive, and he and his wife were involved in some kind of weird cult, and I cut my fingers down to the tendon while I was trying to shape a stone arrowhead. Good times. But the thing that undid me wasn’t any of that. It was the utter isolation I felt. 

That fall I felt like my whole identity unraveled. I became so afraid of losing myself, that I developed these completely irrational fear–most of them about losing control of who I was. I was afraid of developing an eating disorder. I was afraid of wetting the bed. Neither of these things happened, mind you. But I was so afraid of not being able to relax enough to fall asleep that, night after night, I lay there not falling asleep because I was so afraid that I wouldn’t fall asleep. 

As silly as they sound, it’s still hard for me to talk about them. When I finally cut my finger in that flintknapping accident, it was during a class that we were teaching to about a dozen participants. I ran off clutching my fingers trying to hold the separated skin together. One of the students was a nurse who followed me up to the barn. She inspected my wound, and she bandaged it, and she asked me how I was doing. For weeks I had been pretending to everyone around me that everything was fine. I was trying to be professional. I was just trying to hold myself together to keep from exploding into dust. And when she asked that question, I couldn’t pretend anymore. I wept. I sobbed. I melted into a puddle of snot. And this woman … she put her arm around me and just let me cry. I have no idea who that woman was. I can’t remember her name. I wish that I could somehow reach out to her and tell her that she saved my life that day. 

I’ll tell you one thing about that pain. It made me feel very, very humble. And when I finally arrived home and felt the presence of my family and Laura and my friends, I was so aware of how much I needed them. How I couldn’t survive without them. 

I’ll tell you another thing. Those wounds didn’t go away just because I returned from the wild. Not my hand. And not my heart either.  

Boulder Outdoor Survival School

I wrestled with irrational anxieties for most of the next decade, but they ended as abruptly as they came. Funnily enough, it was on another survival adventure–a walkabout in southern Utah … the kind of trip that I’d dreamed about for most of my life. Laura was pregnant with our first child, and I knew that if I was ever going to go on such a trip, it would have to be then. It was one of the most transformative experiences that I have ever had. 

Unlike the experience that left me so scarred in college, I wouldn’t undertake this adventure alone. And, also unlike that experience, which mostly took place on a mountaintop farm … this was a much more authentic experience of trying to live on the land. I shivered in bivvies of pine needles and went days without food. I got altitude sickness and hyponatremia and covered about seventy miles. 

I learned a lot about staying warm and dry, about field dressing an animal, about starting fires without matches, and navigating by landmarks and compass bearings. But I also learned about navigating the wilderness inside of me. It was the terrain I most needed to explore. 

One day, having already walked some ten miles on only a handful of food and still miles to go to my destination, I had this thought that has echoed in my heart ever since. My pack was light, but my load was still heavy because I carried my hunger and my thirst … and they really did feel like physical weights strapped to my body. I felt them weighing me down, and I thought, “That’s okay, I know what to do here. I know I can endure these things. I just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other.” The realization that I could carry these discomforts, that I was strong enough to bear them, struck me almost physically … and I remember saying out loud to myself, “Hunger is just hunger. Thirst is just thirst.” They stopped being abstract boogeymen. I could handle them. And then this feeling of heat washed over me as I realized that it was the same with all of those irrational fears I’d been carrying too. “Fear was just fear.” I couldn’t make the fear go away any more than I could make the hunger or the thirst go away … But I could carry it … I was strong enough to just keep putting one foot in front of the other. I could carry that fear all the way across the desert. A Buddhist might call this radical acceptance. 

When I returned home from that trip, a funny thing had happened. My fears didn’t go away, but they had become ghosts. They still haunted me, but somehow, now, they were insubstantial. And so many of the other big problems that I had returned to in my normal life, now seemed imaginary. In comparison to the difficulties of survival, everything else … was easy … I wasn’t going to die. I had all the water I could drink. I could sleep warm even in the depths of winter. 

I think this is all I know about pain. It is just pain. It can be carried. Even if you can’t make it go away. And for that I am grateful. 

Third Witness: A Television Sitcom

Telling this story again makes me realize the other things that I have gotten from pain. It was the pain of hunger and cold and thirst that made my life easy when I returned. It was the contrast. 

The door at the end.

Micheael Shur’s The Good Place, was an NBC sitcom about moral philosophy. I’ve talked about it before in another episode of this podcast. It was also the story of some hapless souls trying to navigate their way through a confounding afterlife. In the climactic fourth season, after breaking out of hell and reforming the procedure for final judgment, the characters finally find themselves in the actual Good Place, the heavenly abode of souls that have lived a moral life … only to find that the place is infected with a crippling ennui. In the end, a life of perfection turns out to be a tragedy. Without pain, without death, without the immanent threat of loss, the residents of the good place are unable to truly appreciate the good place they are in. A life of perfection, a perfect life, at least according the writers of this series would be empty of the meaning that would make all the good things matter. 

Some Buddhist traditions also have their heavens and hells. I have seen diagrams lavishly illustrating all the planes of existence in Buddhist cosmology. But amidst all of these worlds, the teachers say, it is only this one where liberation can be achieved. Too much suffering, it seems, and we cannot attend to anything but our pain. Too little, and we have no reason to attend to it at all.   

In the The Good Place sitcom, the characters create a solution that gave the final episode of this mostly comedic show surprising and beautiful emotional and thematic weight. They decide to install a door in heaven. Any soul who walks through that door would cease to be. They could, consciously and peacefully, end their existence for good. 

It turns out that it is the darkness between the stars that makes them so precious. 

It may be true that broccoli does not affect the flavor of chocolate, but if we can eat chocolate all the time without any greens in sight, we cease to take delight in it. 

I don’t want to suffer. I don’t want to be in pain. If I could make the pain in my body go away, I would. But I would not trade that for a life where the miraculous workings of my body ceased to bring me joy. 

Perhaps suffering can be redeemed, if only because it awakens us to the preciousness of what we have.  

Closing Arguments: Non-Toothaches

I once had the privilege of attending a talk given by Thich Nhat Hahn. The Vietnamese peace activist and Buddhist monk was nominated for the Nobel peace prize but Martin Luthur King Jr. himself. The talk was given in a giant sports arena, a place usually housing thousands of roaring and screaming fans. But on the day I was there, the arena, though full, was almost silent. I remember being charmed by Nhat Hanh’s genuineness, his unassuming charisma, his gentleness. His speech was slow and deliberate, but not self conscious. I remember little of what he said, save this. “A non-toothache is very pleasant.” And therein lies the catch, doesn’t it? Most of us are afflicted with non-toothaches all the time. But how often does the pleasure of  those non-toothaches strike us? 

I think the pain that maybe, maybe, the problem is not with the pain itself. Maybe the problem is how the pain interacts with the joy. Just like my desert survival trip threw the ease and comfort of my non-dester life into delicious relief, a toothache, once healed or treated, can make us so grateful … so, so grateful … for the teeth that don’t hurt. Or alternatively, the pain can be so great, so distracting, like it was that day when my family found me hunched over the couch, that we can’t appreciate the non-toothache at all because the pain crowds everything out. 

I’m not sure how a person goes about using this insight. We don’t often get to pick the pains we feel. Almost always death and loss and grief and debilitating pain catch us so by surprise. What can we do but try to endure? To put one foot in front of the other and carry what loads we can. 

But perhaps we can hold this idea. Perhaps I can hold this idea through the smaller pains. Perhaps I can use the pains that I can manage like the frame of a picture. Something to contain the beauty, to point it out, to bring to mind all of the non-toothaches that I have. 

Thich Nhat Hahn writes, “Life is full of suffering, but it is also full of wonderful things, like the blue sky, the sunshine, the eyes of a baby. Life is full of suffering, but suffering is not enough.”

Deliberation 

In the end, I don’t think that I can find the defendant not guilty. I am NOT thankful for pain. But I am thankful for the light it casts on the other treasures of my life. I am thankful for the things that make my suffering bearable. I am thankful for the strength I have to bear it. I am thankful for relief when it comes. And, when the pain isn’t too loud, I am thankful for the way it wakes me up to the joys that have slumbered through. 

But pain and suffering may be the frame of the picture … but I love the picture. Jack Gilbert says, “Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. 

Heart Breaks with Love

You don’t get to choose if you get hurt. You will.  No one escapes this life without a broken heart. If I could design the Universe differently without robbing it of its meaning, I would.

But maybe there is no other way. Winter enlivens the spring. Want enlivens plenty. Someday I’ll lose my mom and my dad. Someday I’ll lose my wife, or she will lose me. 

Maybe the only way to love is with a broken heart, or at least a breakable one. But I still choose it. I will choose it a thousand thousand times.

The defendant is guilty. The sentence is nothing. Let her go free.