Dude Pain
“My shit always works sometimes” - Mike Lowry, Bad Boys
"There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound; for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist." —Miguel de Unamuno
The tragic sense of life Dude, you drone on a bit here. Fair. Bit dark. Fair.
The morning is still a bit damp, still dark, but the fire is lit, the bitter tonic brewed and the dog greeted. I have a different relationship with pain. A personal, professional and aspirational one. What are you on about Dude? I have had some injuries: a shattered elbow, a lumbar disc rupture and 5 knee surgeries because of an ACL and meniscus repair where the hardware got infected. Not to mention the other fractures and injuries I have ignored because they aren’t important. I have studied pain down to the fibre type that transmits it: slow or fast, large or small (in nanometers), myelinated, unmyelinated, all of them afferent or delivering signals, but what type of signal. Sharp or dull, midline or lateralised; which organ, surface and surrounding structures deliver what type. They actually pay me mostly as a pain interpreter. Is this pain gonna kill me? That is skipping over the fact that the mind could care less if you have a physical injury; if you lose a partner, loved one or are being expelled from a social group, we interpret that as a life threat and have or feel pain. Hence why people describe pain or hurt when they talk about love and loss.
We have few perceptions or tools to interpret the world, so we use the same signals to curb risky behaviour. Galen in 150AD said, “it was better to endure pain than be enslaved to the plant”. He too was referring to the poppy, which we have refined and mixed into all the opiates we now use the term opiate to describe: media “opiates/opioids for the masses”, movies, music, culture with screen time and social media capping the blame ad nausea. The beautiful game has been described this way. Like a balm or salve to calm or relax everyone. This is why I want to play so much, to experience, to feel, not just observe and placate myself. I want to feel; I am fine with pain, go hard, feel the lactate burn in your muscles, drive until you get cramps cause they only come when you rest or stop. I aspire for pain; I want to use the lactate threshold to train, to swim, to run, to lift heavy things. It is a signal that tells me when to go harder or dial back. Why would the dude spend all his letter on pain? Because it is just a part of life. I don’t have to like it, but I can use it. Feel it. Endure it. Suffer for it. Learn from it. Relate to others based on my experience of it.
Te Wero (the challenge)
Don’t shy away from life- hard, painful, difficult; endure and work, run, try.
Yo-ho, Let’s Roll.