At Peace with Pain and Pleasure

I have an hour before midnight to post this blog article, having completed my work for the day.  I have been thinking for the past few days to write something about the purification power of pain but a quick search of my blog shows that it is a topic that has been well-covered before. 

In  A Meditation on Pain, which I wrote in 2003 in Jakarta after the terrorist bombing of the Marriot Hotel there, I ruminated on the pain suffered by the family members of the victims in the blast, including the widow of a taxi driver who was killed in the blast. Is time the only way to heal pain? Time is a slow healer but it will do its job if you'd allow it to. Trust time, for it works incessantly.

In The Purifying Power of Pain, I explained the roots of pain and how many spiritual traditions practice self-mortification as a way of proactively taking pain to induce a sort of spiritual healing of the soul. In The Palette of Pain (2019) and The Penance of Pain written last year, I suggested that since pain is an inescapable part of life, one should choose one's pain wisely. All pleasures are paid with pain. We should always choose the type of pain that we are 'good at'--one's that we are willing to take, which then determines the kind of pleasures that we should go for. It is simply living within your means.

It doesn't mean that we should avoid or become hypersensitive towards pain. Instead by studying the mechanics of pain, one learns to harness its power. Pain transforms you and the world. Every change in the world comes through a process of pain.  No pain, no gain as the cliche goes. In The Pain of Pleasure, I wrote that "pain and pleasure comes bundled together".

It looks like I've thoroughly expounded my philosophy of pain in this blog. There's nothing more that needs to be said. So this article is a kind of review and summary of everything I've come to understand about pain. 

Writing is both a pain and a pleasure. There are days when we stare at a blank page and nothing we write seem to come out right but there are also days when everything sentence seem so effortless. I've learned to just plough on no matter what. We can never stop thinking, it seems. That we can be very sure of. But is the chatter in the mind worth putting into words on the written page?

Cyberspace does not care. It is already filled with so much garbage. We can only spew out words that we think are worth writing about. Once they are out there, the state of the universe would have been changed. You've added some fresh data into the mix, no matter how small they are. Who knows what kind of chaos they could create?

An online persona is a projection of your egoic mind. And when you crave for hits and attention, you should expect to get an equal amount of positive and negative comments. There--you have that perfect setup for an act of penance. But remember, the internet is an amplifier--of both pain and pleasure. Are you ready to take them in such heavy doses?

There is no escaping from the onslaught of pain and pleasure. It is the very essence of living. So take small doses of it every day, that you may build up your inner resilience. And when you do, you'll be finally at peace with both pain and pleasure, as I am now.