Pain… Is it really painful?

The other day I was having a painful conversation with my friend. No, not literally "painful" but a conversation about living life with pain. I told him how boring life would be if we didn’t suffer pain. He nodded his head in agreement. Pain is one of the many feelings that we human beings have and a deficiency in it, just like in any one of the feelings, will make us feel so incomplete. I agree nobody like suffering from pain but just think how boring life would be if we didn’t feel pain.

“Pain is not just a feeling; it is an emotion, a very strong one.” – Tariq Akhtar

Imagine this… you are crossing the road, a speeding car comes by and knock you down. You lay there with fractured bones and a smile on your face. Yes, a smile on your face! Because there’s no pain, so no point of crying out with ‘pain’. Or imagine this… you are playing a game of soccer and a player of your opponent team tackles you and you glidingly fall to the ground. You badly scratched your arms and legs; blood is oozing out of your limbs and you are ‘okay’ with it. Because you do not feel pain! Boring yeah? Still not convinced? OK – I agree that you would love to have a life without pain where you badly hurt yourself and you feel nothing.

Now let’s have a different picture here. You are out on a date with your girl at the garden (ahem!) that is filled with sweet-smelling flowers. She likes roses: the red ones! You forgot to bring one along with you but you see there are shrubs of roses in the garden. In order to impress her you pick one, or a bunch of them, but you forgot to take their thorns off. Now when you gift them to your girl, the thorns prick her soft hands but there’s nothing that happened to her. Now let’s look it differently. After you gave her the roses and the thorns prick her hand and blood starts flowing, she cries out loud as she’s experiencing pain. Now you have a good chance to hold her hands and console her, isn’t it? So you see how important is pain and how it can lead to romance? ;)

Alright, the above example was just for lovebirds: exclusive! But under normal conditions pain is really not painful. I mean it is painful but it is still a pleasure to suffer from pain. It’s all in the psyche – the way you perceive it. If you want to feel pain as painful then it will be painful but if you try to find pleasure in your pain then you wouldn’t really feel the pain. Try it and let me know! :)

P.S. This blog post was completely written at the branch of ICICI bank while I was waiting my turn to talk to the Privilege Banking representative.