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My butt hurts.
Rode my bike this morning. Went too far. Got too ambitious.
Butt burned. Felt like my seat was sticking a rusty but well-sharpened butcher knife in both cheeks. Couldn’t stand up to pedal. Hurt to try that. Hurts to sit now. But somehow all of it satisfying, as if I had to feel that pain for my day to amount to something meaningful.
While grinding out the last few miles, I thought of Olympic swimmers, long-distance runners, and Tour de France cyclists and all the pain they feel while training and in races. How do they deal with this torture? I thought.
Are they tougher than me? Am I just weak mentally, allowing thoughts of pain to trigger thoughts of stopping, just getting off the damn bike and walking for a while?
But that would make for a long walk back to my final destination which was miles away. So I kept going despite the discomfort. A metaphor for life: persistence when confronted with adversity. Isn’t this almost a daily occurrence? If not daily, at least monthly always.
All our lives we run into unpleasant physical agony or negative thoughts or worries about what might happen next, and yet we keep going, for days that become decades and culminate in lifetimes. We have a choice. We can quit, lay in bed, and sit around for the rest of our days, but we know that’s not the smart path to fulfillment.
Enduring difficulties is. Feeling the knives sticking into our butt cheeks, figurately, we say to ourselves we’re not going to let that stop us because all it is pain and nothing else and we know we can endure enormous amounts of physical, psychological, interpersonal, and emotional pain because we have been doing it throughout our lives.
For three hours we sit at a tight and uncomfortable desk and wrestle with SAT questions designed to trick us into falling for the wrong answers that, if we do on too many questions, lowers our scores. If we get enough wrong, the options we have for admittance to colleges are narrowed. Doors close.
For thirty-five years or more, we wake up and go to work at a place we often don’t particularly enjoy with people who behave in their own best interests which means often not in our interests.
We are told what needs to be done and how well and if we don’t deliver we start to feel the pressure to improve or we may not keep our jobs which makes us anxious and we start worrying that, if that happens, we may need to find another way to pay for food to keep us alive.
That’s mental pain.
Life is not all pain, but a lot of it is. When our loved ones pass away, we feel the pain of thinking that the person we cared about won’t be a part of our lives anymore. When we get fired, we feel the pain of not being wanted; in effect, the employer says “We don’t want you around her anymore.”
As harsh as it is, it is all truly the way this goes down often; not always, but still often. The world hurls pain our way if not every day certainly with regularity.
The question always being asked of us is whether we’re going to wilt when the pain hits or figure out a way to deal with it and, even better, turn it into positive attitudes and outcomes.
Today when the butt pain could not have been worse, I kept pedaling, thinking about how many other people have endured pain – such as cancer patients and older people in nursing homes struggling to breathe – and I just kept going. I’m not a hero for doing this.
I’m just a guy. It was just another day when pain came my way as it will for many others today and tomorrow and for any human being wherever they are in this world.
Pain is a part of life. Plowing through it is, too, to feel, for example, what I do now, which is a natural endorphin high that has me thinking how great it feels to be alive.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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