Pain as Purpose
Our discussion with Dr. Ritchie was extremely insightful this past Thursday. One of the elements that stood out most to me was our analysis of pain. The nature of pain—the sources of pain—how mental illness intersects.
What struck me is that we addressed pain as two things:
Pain is, in some form or another, inevitable. We experience the pain of purposelessness simply from not doing anything; what more from something that pushes our very limits?
Pain is unrelated to the concept of purpose.
This second point is what I am most fascinated by. Like many other emotions, pain can be both well placed and very, very much so not. There is such a thing as righteous anger, and there is such a thing as unabated, unreasonable, uncontrolled rage. So too for joy, where joy can celebrate and it can ignore substantial concerns.
The problem is that we implicitly assume that pain either is always bad, leading either to anguish or to an attempt to break the first rule of pain and sanitize life of emotion. Or, some of us can assume that all pain has purpose, which is equally untrue. For something to be disconnected from another concept means that no causal link can be drawn. So on the one hand, the pain of pushing for a six-minute mile or embarking on the struggle of raising a child can be good—a transformative process that burns away impurities in our musculature or mind. On the other, pain from needless rumination and existential dread about crises with nonzero, but astronomically low odds, can be utterly worthless, and worth purgation.
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