“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.”
—Carl Jung
My oldest granddaughter is two years old, and she’s so much fun! She’s constantly on the go, in exploration mode, walking fast and investigating her world. In the process, she’s learning what she can do on her own, without help or support. This occasionally leads to missteps, resulting in cuts, bumps, and bruises. This trial-and-error dance with pleasure and pain is one way she learns about her world and begins to develop patterns around what works and what doesn’t.
Witnessing her personal learning curve reminds me of one of my favorite quotes about our shared human experience on planet Earth:
In this life there will be lessons. And those lessons will be repeated until they are learned.
Pain is a critical learning tool for human survival. It tells us what to do more—or less—of; it’s a way to evaluate the worthiness of a task or goal. How much pain am I willing to endure? Most would agree this is proportional to the reward. (For example, you’d really have to want to run a marathon in order to endure the training and fatigue that comes with it.)
Ultimately, pain comes for us all. There is no way to avoid it. Earth is a place where life eats life every living thing ultimately dies. Still, humans show up and engage with courage, compassion, and love. We know that showing love for another person will bring moments of pain, and yet we love nonetheless. We know that aspiring and dreaming carries the risk of falling short, and yet we continue to strive for our goals.
It’s important to reflect upon the pain we experience in our lives and contemplate what it might teach us. If each painful experience was translated into a lesson, what learning would it invite? What change might be wrought by that painful experience?
Every human emotion requires the presence of its opposite in order to exist. Joy lives in partnership with sorrow. Victory dances with defeat. Love flirts with loss. Trusting walks the tightrope of disappointment and the risk of being let down. And yet we embrace joy, pursue victory, love others, and trust those around us all the same. The potential for pain is the price we pay for a life in this world.
One of the hardest things to do is watch a friend or loved one experience pain, yet we know it’s unavoidable. It’s where growth resides. As Rumi once said, “The wound is where the light comes in.” Like everything in life, the story we choose to tell ourselves about pain determines how we experience it. As sure as my granddaughter will fall again while trying something new, I will be rooting for her to keep exploring the outer reaches of her known world, where pain and growth simultaneously reside.
