I wanted to share an old blog that I wrote about pain on an old blog of mine.  Hope it makes as much sense to you as it does to me.

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Tonight I made a cup of noodles and just a few minutes after I poured the boiling water into the cup, I spilled a little bit of the soup all over myself.  It got on my right leg and my left hand, between my thumb and pointer finger.  I didn’t want to move too fast because I didn’t want to spill any more of it, so the water had more than enough time to do a little bit of damage, especially on my hand.

It hurt prrrretty badly, and my hand was stinging for a lot longer than I thought it would.  And I was sitting there on my futon, holding my hand up in front of me, trying to distract myself from the pain while at the same time waiting for it to go away.

As I was staring at the redness starting to form on my hand, I started thinking about pain.  What is it, really?  It’s one of those things that we carry with us for seconds and lifetimes at a time.  I thought about my friend who just recently lost someone really important in her life, and the kind of pain she must feel.  And I thought about the pain I felt when I lost someone years ago, and the same pain I feel after those years had passed.  The pain I felt when someone hurt me, the pain on my hand that didn’t seem to be stopping, the pain people feel when they find that they have nothing left to lose, and the pains we feel in general, the ones that remind us that we’re human.

And suddenly I didn’t feel anything anymore.

Did it just stop hurting or did time heal the pain?

And then I thought, time doesn’t heal anything or anyone.  It just helps us to get used to the pain until we realize that we don’t want to feel it anymore.

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Here’s a photo of me donating blood recently.  Pain is nothing!