Attic Fashion (2011). Model: Sarah Harris. Hair & Makeup: Christopher Thompson. Styling: Tiffany Gilstrap Scott.
Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.—Angelina Jolie
[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Humans are designed with a built-in warning device called pain. We feel it soon after we are detached from our mother’s umbilical cord. Hunger is our first experience with pain. We cry and someone feeds us. The pain is our body’s way of telling us that something isn’t working correctly, that a part of us needs attention. Yet, as a society we are intolerant of pain and just as we remove the batteries from smoke detectors so that we don’t have to put up with the screeching sound going off at unexpected moments, we try to mask or cover or ignore the pain we feel. We shove the pain into our emotional attic and try to forget that it exists.
As young children, we are taught that expressing our feelings of pain is not acceptable. “Walk it off.” “Suck it up.” “No pain, no gain.” Our intent is to dissuade children from complaining about every little insignificant boo-boo they encounter. “If it’s not bleeding, you don’t need a bandage.” The longer-term effect, though, is that from those very early moments we teach children that feeling and expressing pain is a bad thing. No one wants to hear about your pain. Ignore it and it will go away. Be tough and play through the pain.
Often, however, that strategy backfires on us. My father’s youngest sister succumbed to cancer perhaps sooner than was necessary because she chose to treat the pain, not the cause. Rather than being consistent with the chemotherapy, she chose alternative treatments that only covered up the pain. Only when the pain became intolerable did she return to her doctor, and by then the cancer had spread too for treatment to be effective. She didn’t even communicate to her family that anything was wrong until the pain became debilitating. She didn’t want them to worry. She had seven children and wanted to put pain aside to care for them. While her attitude might seem noble, in the end it took her from them sooner than might have been necessary.[/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Part of our problem in dealing with pain is that we look at it as an inconvenience and a bother rather than the warning system it is. When, as a child, we first encounter something hot and we pull back from it, learn to treat it with some respect and don’t touch it again without taking appropriate precaution to not burn ourselves. That is an appropriate response to pain. Consider what causes the problem. Fix it, if possible. Respect what caused the pain and then take steps to not repeat the pain again. Yet, we don’t apply that formula too often once we pass the age of five. We prefer to ignore the pain and keep going.
Philosopher/poet Kahlil Gibran penned these wise words:
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses
your understanding.Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its
heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.And could you keep your heart in wonder at the
daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem
less wondrous than your joy;And you would accept the seasons of your heart,
even as you have always accepted the seasons that
pass over your fields.And you would watch with serenity through the
winters of your grief.
As we get older, pain becomes a more constant part of our reality. There are some pains, both physical and emotional, that will never go away no matter what we do. Â Our challenge is to not look at our pain as an inconvenience, but rather an opportunity to learn.[/one_half_last]
Self
The Beauty In Nature (2009)
Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.—Golda Meir
[one_half padding=”4px 0 px 0 4px”]Over the years, I think more has been written about the self than any other topic. Self-worth, self-esteem, self-identity, self-loathing, self-love, and self-help are all topics that have lined bookshelves and stores as long as humans have put ink on parchment. We are very concerned about ourselves and have little difficulty discussing ourselves endlessly, especially now that we have social media so that we can broadcast every ridiculous and trivial detail about ourselves to the entire world. With the advent of  phones with cameras, we’ve even started taking voluminous pictures of ourselves, and call them selfies. We are, and always have been, quite full of ourselves.
What has been born out by countless research, however, is that for all our bravado, we really don’t like ourselves all that much. How one sees one’s self determines to a large degree how one sees others. Where we are unsure of our own qualities we find fault in others in an effort to compensate for and distract from our insecurities. We don’t like our bodies, so we shame the bodies of others. We are embarrassed by our own sexual proclivities, so we express outrage at the sexual identities of others. We feel inadequate in our own understanding of a subject, so we refer to those who are experts on that subject in as unflattering a way as possible.Every negative we see or imagine in ourselves we reflect back in some way negatively on others. [/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]For several years, self-help and self-improvement books and audio tapes have been one of the world’s best-selling genres. We understand that our view of ourselves is inferior and misguided, but we are unsure how to best address the issue. Then, studies have shown, once we purchase the book and begin to see what is required to change, we give up and stop reading. We want to improve ourselves without having to make any significant changes or sacrifice to our current lives. If possible, we would happily take a pill to make it all better, but to have to actually work toward improvement is something very few of us are disciplined enough to actually do.
So, we continue, from one generation to the next, parent to child, handing down the same foibles and shortcomings that have limited us since the dawn of our existence. We fight the same wars, often with the same group of people, we have the same arguments, we battle the same ghosts as everyone who has gone before us. We blame others for refusing to change, to grow, or evolve, not wanting to realize that the problem is more with us than with them.
We talk a lot about improving the world, but we must first start by improving ourselves.[/one_half_last]
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