Since my last I have hardly ventured outside due to a pain in my thigh. It’s not swollen and there is no bruise, just a pain sometimes severe, as when walking or standing. I suppose a muscle got pulled on Friday when I went up to that mysterious US base. Each day since recovering from chronic illness eighteen months ago I have been grateful for feeling so fit and healthy. Now I’m revisiting the landscape of those former days: travelling by motor car rather than foot; creeping across the road slowly and painfully when the impatient motorists allow; stuck indoors. Those limping, care-worn, down-in-the-mouth persons that I’ve passed in the town these last months are no different from me except that I’ve been well and they were probably in pain.
How to respond to pain? It’s a question asked by every sportsman, soldier, woman in labour, cancer sufferer, torture victim, overworked slave or pack animal. Heed its message or defy it? Stay in touch with my sensitive body or seek relief? Rise above it through mind over matter, or be humbled by it? In practical terms I am going to see the doctor tomorrow, though time may be the first healer.
As a seven-year old child in hospital, I had to endure a painful daily injection, and recall reading a comic there which depicted someone being stabbed in the belly with a Roman short sword. Those cruel, stoical Romans! I felt it in imagination like that needle but a hundred times worse. I could not believe that the victim survived. I must have thought that you could die of pain.
Why is the world is divided on how to treat pain? On the one hand, we have analgesics. On the other we have acupuncture and “mind over matter”. When it comes to treating cancer, there are quite opposing and irreconcilable views. If Western medicine and its alternatives—traditional therapies laced with snake-oil—are at one another’s throats, it must be that neither has the definitive solution.
Once it was capitalism versus communism, two models of civilisation which seemingly required nuclear weapons to protect themselves against one another. Then communism gave up, at least in the USSR (how antique those initials sound now!) but a fight had to be picked with a new enemy: Islam, or “global terror”. Islam is a peaceful religion but you have to keep provoking it, just as you have to provoke the bull, to make sure it will fight. For the sake of pain? Don’t ask me.
It’s clear why pain has evolved in animal species: to warn us of danger and stop us in our tracks. It’s powerful. I went to a boarding school, aged 6½. Six strokes of the cane spoke loud and brutal, rendering sermons redundant. Pain humbles us: perhaps too much.
Like a wounded animal, I curl up in a safe place and lick my wounds.
a wayfarer’s notes 
drink hot milk early in the morning for few days. it surely helps. take care…
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I don't like to complain about the way life on our planet is designed, but it seems to me that the degree of pain is disproportionate to the biological purpose of warning us that something is wrong.
I hope you feel better quickly. I've limped around in great pain with a couple of knee injuries in the past, now healed, and if what's wrong with you has anything in common with that, rest and time (and not accepting doctor's invitations to surgical “procedures”) will heal. I've heard good reports about acupuncture for relief of pain.
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they say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, nothing happens for no reason in this universe… we experience bliss and pain, the duality of life, non of it is real but both feel as such. i guess the more we evolve in the spirit realm the more bliss we experience… just an intuitive thought.
maybe is the earth crying through us? i don't know, i sense that it is part of our evolution, maybe it makes us more human, more compasionate. everything is just a lesson for our soul, the quicker we learn it, the faster we pass the test.
hope your wound heals promptly.
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Thanks for these comments. I'm just about to drink that hot milk at 5.34 am.
Actually I think it is a jolly good idea to complain about the way life on our planet is designed. Let's give God some honest feedback, otherwise we'll go on as if it were our fault, which it's not! I reject the notion of original sin.
L*F*, thanks for your remarks too, though your nom-de-plume made me nervous at first in case some crazed spammer had descended. I'm not being prudish, i just don't want to disappoint those who may use search engines to get here! But I agree with what you have expressed & am glad you came.
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Vincent,
I could write volumes on pain, but I add my best wishes that this passes quickly and easily for you.
Pain as a messenger is something of interest to me. Not merely a messenger of imminent harm, but also as a messenger of things in our lives that perhaps we ought to be paying attention to and are not…thereby being manifested in physical form.
Again, may you feel relief very soon.
peaceful blessings, and Love be with you.
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thanks so much Serenity for your good wishes! the doctor has prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs and best of all has said I should not stop walking – just go easy for a few days.
Yes, pain is a most interesting topic & I plan to write more, perhaps entitled “The Placebo Effect”. It's all to do with pain being a messenger, whether to warn us of physical harm (I thought I might be causing long-term damage to my muscles until the doctor gave reassurance) or as you say, something in our lives that needs attention.
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Hullo Vincent, I'm sorry to hear you are in pain and feeling somewhat downcast. Its got to be a muscle pull. Fill up a glass bottle with hot water, and press-roll this over your leg and thigh (like using a rolling pin). That should give a lot of relief. Also keeping your legs in a bucket of hot water, esp before going to bed. Best, rama
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Bodies are strange things. Can remember ..motored back from the pub in the dinghy one night a long time ago, found no light in the boat, tried to start the diesel motor with handle. Two pulls and ..erarrch! did me back in. Excruciating pain. Couldn't sit down, couldn't stand up. Rethought a whole lot of activities. Couldn't afford doctors and stuff. Just kept gently moving. Listened to me body. Took nearly 3 months, but now have no trouble.
Not easy to listen within.
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