Over the years, living life and learning to appreciate struggles, successes, gain and loss was something that I had begun to contemplate regularly. There are always opportunities to learn. What is among the best ways to learn, times of pain and even deep distress. Times of loss. It would seem to me that the only time where our appreciation was all the more real was after a time of loss through the pain of losing someone, a job, a relationship, etc.
As long as things are going well, we tend to take things for granted after a time. If we get what we want for a prolonged period of time, it seems to bring us to a place of complacency and certain aspects of life become superfluous. I had found that when you want to know what people really think of you, at least in general and perhaps not as often as it would seem, see what happens when they no longer need you. I think that many of us have been there. We get what we want and we tend to forget some of the key people who got us to a place of little to no worry. At least for a time.
Pain brings out many things within a person. It could bring out the good and the bad. Many often do all that they can moving forward to mitigate and curtail as much pain as possible. Mechanisms to ensure that we no longer suffer loss seems to be a quest that many of us embark upon. The reality is that loss is a part of life, yet we still do all that we can to ensure that loss will never come again. Fear sets in and causes us to utilize tactics and methods to even ensnare others into a web of deception and destruction while still actively pursuing what it is that we desire expecting positive results and outcomes. Strangely, the idea that we reap what we sow doesn’t always seem to hold true. But the fact remains that we are not always around when others may be suffering from something that they did before. Some of us have a tendency to hide our rough periods that might be a direct response to what we caused through our decisions earlier. So, I will leave my judgments about age old truths out.
Pain brings focus. Pain, while it does cause one to isolate themselves for a time, can also cause one to see the world differently. If we have love within our hearts and we are aware of how pain feels, we would desire to not cause others pain. Pain brings suffering and within that suffering the appreciation of simple things can come. Pain is a teacher that causes one to experience what it feels like to not have a privilege or even a necessity. To be looked down upon, disdained, even hated is a horrible feeling. It is even more horrible when one hasn’t done anything to warrant such. The world can be a cruel place at times and people can be cruel and even heartless. It occurred to me that some of this heartlessness that comes from others is due to their own individual failures. When others are not happy, some of them do not desire to see you happy. Dark places can cause this in some. The good thing is that we can learn to be and do differently. I learned that I didn’t have to hate and mistreat others just because I was going through rough periods that were either my fault or not. Though we do not like pain, it is still beneficial within the process of development. Development doesn’t end until we are no longer in the position to develop.
I know pain from my own experiences. I know what it is like to have periods of ups and downs. It once affected me deeply to know that I had some experiences that others within my life at different times could not relate too. The silence after demonstrating my experiences to others at one time led me to believe that they did not care. I look back now and realize that if others cannot relate, how do they respond? So, I shut my feelings off and began to intellectualize them. I would only allow a part of me to surface. I became very much guarded and constructed an impenetrable invisible wall around me to ensure that I would not experience certain levels of hurt and pain from others. Oh, how we allow others to control us. How we allow the world to dictate us to be even when they are unaware that that is what we are in fact doing. The defense mechanisms that we devise are quite interesting and oh, how they hold us back and hinder us from living fully. I had learned how to look in the mirror and call it the situation what it was.
To be honest, I have still yet to fully tear my walls down. I am still learning myself and growing. I am still becoming more and more honest with who I am and still determining how I want to move forward. Perhaps this is a process. Some go through physical pain, while others go through emotional and even psychological pain. I am aware of all three. For some reason the pain that I summoned within this reality was psychological and emotional mostly. I had reasoned that just as physical scars upon our bodies leave remnants, so do the ones that we cannot see. Experiences never leave us. Not even phases as some would like to call them. They are all still very much a part of us. It is how we choose to deal with them and move forward is the real issue. Our personalities are not static as Rollo Tomassi stated within “The Rational Male.” They are indeed malleable, though we often hear from many that they are just who they are. This is where perception becomes key. You cannot go where your mind has not already had the pleasure of going.
A Traveler 