Opportunity

"The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers."

-M. Scott Peck 

Remember my post about pain? This is a bit of an extension of that piece. I think about pain quite often because as we all know, it's inevitable and quite common. For many people it's about as common as a traffic light, that it seems no matter how fast we can coast, we still get interrupted at every bloody intersection. But maybe it doesn't have to be that bad! If we can somehow turn it into an opportunity of some sort (like catching up on our texts... just kidding!!!) then maybe we won't let it keep us from totally missing the boat. 

Andrew and I watched a movie on the weekend called Shutter Island. At one point, Leonardo DiCaprio has a hallucination in a cave with a woman and she describes the process of pain to him. Pain is not processed through the flesh like we are all led to believe but rather it is processed through the nervous system. Of course, the sensory receptors in the flesh take the initial signal of pain (touching a hot stove, the finger waves a "holy fuck this is hot" flag and beats the shit out of the neuron messenger that is supposed to carry the message to the spine/brain) but it's the nervous system that is responsible for that feeling of pain. Get it? It tells us how much that hurt, and what we are supposed to do about it. 

I wonder if emotional pain builds up in the nervous system. Scientifically, I guess you could call it an excess of stress hormones like cortisone, etc. So now we have this toxic sludge elbowing its way around our brains. Our brains are telling us, "GET IT OUT OF HERE." When we touch a hot stove, our brain tells our hand to retreat, but when we are feeling emotional pain, more often than not, there's nothing we can do to fix it in the heat of the moment. So our brains are yelling at the rest of our body to get rid of the pain and the rest of our body is like, "oh no... I can't move." 

But as a natural progression, pain produces movement. We touch a hot stove, our hand pulls back. If we allow pain to teach us and move us, then we will save ourselves from standing in that one place with our hand on the fire. It's the same with emotional pain; the longer we stand there, the deeper the scars. If we let pain produce movement, then time will heal.