72. Pain Leads to Insight

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “Pain Leads to Insight.”

I think the vast majority of humanity's pursuits boiled down to an effort to escape pain, but pain built civilization.  We learned to use fire to keep the pain of the cold at bay. We drive cars and use computers to speed everything up so we can avoid the pain of having to wait so long. If pain is such a bad thing, then why is it so often the catalyst for so many good things in my pursuit of understanding?

I found that it's pain itself that forces us to understand a thing. It's almost like how antis snake venom is made from snake venom, or even like the way getting sick makes us immune to that sickness in the future. A lot of times it's like a blessing in disguise because the understanding that comes from pain spares you the confusion the next time around.

The worst kind of pain comes when it's paired with confusion. It isn't simply the pain of the thing that you're experiencing, but it's the pain paired with feeling like you're lost in the woods with no idea which direction to head. Pain and confusion is despair. It's significantly easier to walk a hundred miles if you can see the peaks of the mountains that you're trying to reach versus, for example, walking a hundred miles in a jungle where you have no reference for your progress.

Pain only becomes tolerable when you know what direction you're going. Instead of a sadness that comes with that rhyme or reason, the pain becomes part of the journey. It is a consequence of conscious choices. Knowing what direction you're going is like seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. So, I write these episodes largely to make sense of my own pain because understanding a thing is the quickest path in my experience.

To get out of the swamps of torment that we trap ourselves in. When I feel pain in my life, I want it to stop. So, my pain pushes me to think on what the source is and why I am feeling it in hopes of being able to do something about it. Pain itself is not always so unbearable. It's the confusion we experience when we don't understand where it's coming from, when we're deprived of a direction or understanding.

We become hopeless, and that's when we're vulnerable to seek out bandaids to the pain we feel when we get to this place, we have a choice. We can either use our pain to prompt us to greater understanding, or we can temporarily numb it and stay stuck in the same place that we were before. And frankly, I think the world is mostly full of people seeking to numb themselves to pain by using temporary band-aids instead of finding understanding, and we're all worse off for it.

When we do this, we gain nothing from our pain. We stay exactly where we started. The ironic thing about pain is that it has the potential to increase our capacity to endure it. When we seek understanding through pain, we become more and more capable of doing things in life that are painful, which allows us to be more and more helpful to the people around us.

When pain serves the greater purpose of driving you toward greater understanding, then pain suddenly becomes. A meaningful path we have to take, even if we fail to understand the pursuit of understanding in and of itself gives you the power to endure longer. But what about the kind of pain that no one ever asked for pain forced on someone through violence, abuse, or loss?

What meaning can possibly come from that? I've never lived through those kinds of horrors, but I do believe that even in those situations, there is some amount of understanding to be gained. Maybe that understanding amounts to nothing more than an understanding that evil exists and any of us can become its victim.

I would hope that a person in that situation would at least be able to come to the understanding that. They're not made less a person by atrocity, but rather the perpetrator became less of a person in committing it. You may have been touched by evil in some way in your life, but the other person that committed that evil against you was consumed by it in a German concentration camp.

Viktor Frankl found purpose in recording his experience and observations, and as a result, one of the greatest books ever written came into existence. There's understanding and wisdom that can be drawn from even the worst kinds of pain. I once read about this cruel experiment that was done on dogs, so these dogs were randomly shocked.

And for one of the dogs, there was a lever in the kennel or a button or something that if triggered would stop the painful experience. So, after first experiencing this pain, the dog frantically looked around for solutions until it happened to see this switch or lever, whatever it was, and turned it off and going forward, the dog knew what to do.

Anytime that pain came and if it came, it would immediately walk over. And turn it off for the other dog. There was also a lever slash button, but it didn't matter because it was useless. They decided to see what would happen if they administered the pain randomly. Apparently at the beginning, the dog looked around for a solution frantically just like the first one did.

But after several iterations with no solution, the dog just gave up trying, and anytime the pain came, it would just whimper through it. Wouldn't he even move? Eventually they did make the lever in that dog's kennel capable of turning off the pain, but by that point, the dog had already given up. The poor dog at that point didn't even see how it was worthwhile for it to look for a solution.

And that's what happens to us when we can't get to the bottom of whatever's driving our pain. We stop looking for a way out of it. And become complacent with just trying to ignore it. Fortunately for us, unlike those poor dogs, we can find understanding even in pain that seemingly serves no purpose.

Maybe that pain will allow us to more greatly empathize towards others. Maybe it will allow us to endure different kinds of pain. Maybe that pain will make you resilient. Ultimately, pain is less a thing to avoid since there really is no avoiding pain. But it is a thing to manage and to ponder and to use for our benefit.

Sometimes we just have to ride that wave, just like happiness is bound to come and go. So too is pain. Happiness and pain will rise and fall, but our understanding can stay constant and offer us an anchor to reality and help us weather those storms of life. Pain can build walls. Or it can build character.

Will we numb it and stay where we are, or will we wrestle with it and let it lead us somewhere higher? This is Skipping Stones - “Pain Leads to Insight.” You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts for more information about me. Feel free to visit skippingstonessr.com. And if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe.

If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me at info@skippingstonessr.com. New episodes will be released weekly every Monday.