Pain is unfortunately embedded in the process of being alive and healthy. We seem to want to make pain a package of one thing when in reality pain is part of the body’s narrative sending complex messages of an urgent nature regarding the path back to relief and health.  I propose as a culture we are nearly pain illiterate. This illiteracy might help explain much of the broken down political narrative ravaging the United States these days.  We tend to see pain as a simple enemy of the present moment to be rendered neutral through the popping of a pill, the consumption of a drug, distraction, or the acceptance of a convenient lie.  As individuals and a nation we seem to to have trouble reading pain as a subtle road map back to health or whole body peace.  This writer once spent a summer in a hospital, multiple surgeries and rehabilitation so I am not naive about ongoing acute and chronic physical pain. Some pain demands a quick defensive response, but most pain carries an urgent message regarding adaptive body behavior out into the future. 

Billie Collins is my favorite poet.  But if I said I like his poetry because he is an 8 on the scale of 1 to 10, what would you know about Billie Collins?  Who hasn’t been to a hospital where you are asked about your pain on a scale of 1 to 10.  The art of poetry is to concentrate a unique focus of understanding that no other form of narrative can achieve.  It is the same with pain in the body. Anyone who has had to endure prolonged physical pain realizes that pain’s message is delivered sideways, through nuanced twists and turns. Pain instructs where to stop, where to go  and when to relent.  It herds you to where you heal.  Unlike a roadmap, the messaging of the body in both pleasure and pain is insistent, subtle and often difficult to read because the language is delivered through muscle, bone, ligament and nerve. Pain is more like a powerful poem than a instructional narrative.  

A modest proposal for Good

Taking this to the level of political, when this current administration in the United States was elected one year ago, we,  as a nation might have reported a 4 on the pain scale.  Today we could well be closer to an 8.  Pain does not lie.  We can try to ignore pain or tough it out to our peril both in physical body and politics.  The message is never easy and very often complex in both dimensions of life.   With this current national leadership, the feed back loop that carries pain’s messages in politics and economy is being shut down through various forms of censorship.  In the physical body, we call the shutting down and numbing out of pain’s message denial.  Good is demanding disciplined data and truthful feedback. Good is hearing, facing and responding to pain’s news. Even though pain’s news is never good news, it is always critical news demanding a response for real change in behavior. How many lives are lost to disease because we warning numbed out the message of pain?  How many countries have been lost to dictatorship because we agreed to accept the lies of denial when it citizens, like the slowly boiling frogs, reached 8 on the pain scale.  This country won’t survive a 10.  Good is letting pain teach what must be learned. We must become literate in pain’s sometimes hard, poetic language. That would be good.