Serena Says Stuff

There’s a popular ethics question, and it goes something like this. Is a good life one lived without pain? If that answer wasn’t subjective and infinite then my life would be the most terrible life. I have experienced a lot of pain. I mostly sit on the other side of the pain now. Not currently enduring, but forever recovering. I will say if someone came up to me and said I could auction my pain off, I would not do it. Pain is human. Just as much human as happiness. Without pain how are we alive? I feel that pain gives us a reason to fight. It’s the third round and we’ve gotten two black eyes and yet we still give the final punch. Perseverance wouldn’t exist nor would courage. It doesn’t take courage to be happy. It takes courage to be happy after pain.

Yet I feel my ideas aren’t as cohesively formed as others and my life, although painful at times, hasn’t been as hard as others. I’m sure you could ask others who grew up in broken homes or without parental figures whether or not they’d want their pain taken away and maybe they’d say yes. I have come to realize that all of my pain has come from a place of love. I love someone so much that all this pain I feel is all this love repressed. True love is true pain. Love is not forever but pain isn’t either. Yet we focus on certain fleeting feelings than other ones. I’m not a psychologist, I’m just writing my opinion, but we ruminate on bad feelings because how dare they interrupt our happy feelings. Pain is the spotlight hog of the brain. It’s that person who would blow your birthday candles out for you. It makes sense why we would focus on that rather than the person giving us presents.

Is it sadist to say that I like pain? I like the person that develops after I’ve gone through pain. I’m a mature woman. I don’t believe pain is a mistake. I don’t believe it happens at inconvenient times, I think it happens at times when we need to be shown that we can deal with it. Just imagine a life without pain. Every day is sunny, everything goes your way, you never experience obstacles. Wouldn’t that get boring? I think that would create a great sense of entitlement. Some people are born with the ability to feel less pain than others due to economic situations. A rich person born rich will not know the pain of poverty. But they have the ability to learn empathy for others pain.

Life I believe is defined as our ability to handle pain and still feel happiness. There’s so much more too it, but that’s for a different blog post. If we can process pain and still choose happiness we are choosing a better life for ourselves. That’s what I think life is. Happiness after pain.

-Serena