On Pain and Wisdom

I’ve been going through an existential chrisis at the moment.

My unconscious mind has been like a toddler, ‘Why. Why. Why’.

Well, why? Why do I like to write books? Why do I like to help people, aside from the standard masculine need to fix things?

This gets a bit dark, so if you are not vibing what that, scroll down to the Astro.

What I’ve realised is that I’m not into self help, I’m into personal development. If you look quickly these two things are the same. They both want you be better, both systems want you buy their books and programmes. I see the difference is that personal development wants to give you the skills and abilities. Skills to excel in the world in your chosen discipline. And self-help wants you to do the same thing again and again, and come back for more.

I’m a trained nurse, and I’ve spent most of my nursing career in Acute emergency settings. Here I’ve spent lots of time with people having the worst time of their lives. From Strokes, to Car Crashes, to Heart attacks, to Broken bones. And death. Lots of death. My role then, and as I’ve been trained, was to sort out the immediate problem, and help the person not have it again. Be it ‘Dude, you broke both wrists falling drunk off a wall, perhaps don’t do that again. And Ask yourself how are you going to wipe your butt for the next six weeks’ (That guy had a very patient mother.) To ‘Perhaps, pay attention to where the nailgun is pointed before pulling the trigger’. A guy who’d nailed a bit of wood to his leg. Both very physical very blunt situations. Even going so far to help tween agers who desperately want to be ‘normal’ so they skip their insulin and end up in resus. Help them feel normal even though the’ve got to jab themselves with insulin a couple of times a day.

What I’m trying to say is that I want practical solutions to problems. Before I got into nursing, I thought death was the enemy. To battle that certainty as long as possible. To rail against it, to fight. And I have, in massive teams fought to save lives. Faught against death in many forms. But coming out of the other side, death is not the enemy, pain is.

Pain impairs life in so many ways. From the constant hypermobile ache to the pain of a panic attack, to the agony of a life not lived.

And I’m not talking about chronic pain here, that is a whole kettle of fish that has people who are super expert in. If this is you, please realise I’m not talking about that.

What I recognise is that life has pain, and to live life we must accept that. We must realise that to ask the girl out we must face the risk of rejection pain. To gain muscle strength we must first have the pain. To decrease the hypermobile pain we must first accept that there will be pain. Pain as the muscles grow to take the strain. To start a new thing, we must realise the pain of defeat is lurking around the corner. And the pain of inaction does not lessen it grows bigger every day. Not making a choice is making a choice, it’s just one you don’t choose.

But choosing your pain, knowing that this is going to hurt in the short term. And that in the long term there will be bliss is a powerful tool. It's one the Vikings knew. One that we are discouraged from thinking about in our ultra-comfortable society. We know, deep down that we will have to struggle to do the thing. And that the struggle is worth it. Growth causes pain. And we go through it to be better.

What we have in our world is people who’ve gone through their version of the pain. They have learned how to lessen it or avoid it next time. This is how human society works. We can see it in our reactions to hights, thunderstorms and earthquakes. We are primally afraid of these things and learn not to panic about them as we get more mature. We learn how to not make painful mistakes. I feel it is the responsibility of those who’ve learned the hard way. To show those who’ve not yet learned how to avoid said mistakes. We learn not to eat yellow snow and pass it on. We learn not to poke the wasp’s nest. Or touch the stove. Or to reply to the phone call sooner rather than later. To make sure that the sepis patient get the anti-bugs quck, or that the trauma patient stays warm.

In my case I learned to teach by teaching student nurses the mistakes I learned the hard way. To ask for help, and act decisively. More recently, my path has been confused.

The pain of not knowing ones calling spiritually or emotionally. Is a path that I stumbled into without paying attention. The lessons I learned during my original spiritual awakening were lost in Beer and being in my early 20s. Now as a grown up I’m looking at the lessons I learned and how I can help others with that angst of not belonging. Or the pain of feeling that ‘I’m doing it wrong’.

I started in the early part of the 2000s. When I still paid 10p for a text message, and the internet was 56kbs. If you were lucky. I had 33kbs in my Uni shared house. So there was not the massive amount of super easy to access information. There were message bords where people talked about things. But learning came from experience, and wisdom from that. Now there is a plethora of information and opinion.

Note information.

Information is great and says you should take this path. Wisdom is better, it says that that path, but make sure you’ve got some snacks and water because its long and hot. And you’ll probably need a coat as its going to get wet before you’re done. Wisdom can be passed down, as it fits with one’s personal experience. Information is general and devoid of humanity.

So what I’m saying is, information is easily conveyed, easy to find on the internet. Wisdom must be lived to be passed on. Wisdom without life is information. With life information develops depth and meaning, it shows the pitfalls and how to avoid most of the pain. Wisdom helps us become hardy, strong, and powerful. Information builds worry and anxiety as there is not the path to effective use. When we share wisdom we share the lived experience of life. Adding depth and context to the shared experience of being human.

Humans share wisdom, computers share information. And, humans have tools for this, tools that were used way before bits and bytes, ipads and smartphones. The tools to share wisdom are the tools of story and myth. Of Heroes and Villains. Wisdom flows through story. It lifts some of the pain, it lifts some of the suffering. Wisdom defies analytics, whereas information revels in them.

I’m not sure why I’ve subjected you to this. But I hope you find it useful. I did.