The Well Deserved and Needed Pain

You just stumbled on a chair and you hurt your foot's thumb and that's when the pain wakes you up to reality from overthinking, or from going through the room in darkness. It's life's mysterious way to trigger some sort of alarm that something's not going the right way, or that you're not going the right way.

But the pain doesn't have to be physical every time we experience it. Sometimes it is emotional, and sometimes it hurts even more than the physical one, because there's a mind to pour salt on the wound and there's memory to refresh the pain. The body has its immune system that fights, almost on auto pilot, on whatever the living room throws at it, but the soul doesn't have one. There's no heart immune system. It's all in our hands.

I just read @galenkp's latest post and I empathized with the feelings and the situation that his friend is going through. I can't say that I ever was in that situation of refusing to communicate and meet any family member for years, due to some misunderstandings from the past, but I got the bitter taste of this type of situations.

I lived something similar with my grandma, to whom I refused to call that often as she wished and I was even having a sort of repulsion towards her for many years, like she did something wrong to me, when actually didn't. She had her personality and I have mine, she had some expectations and I haven't met them, but that was no reason for my attitude.

However, when my mother called, while I was living in Germany, a few years ago, and told me that she died, I instantly started crying like a baby. Not only because I was sure I will never again see her, after decades in which she clearly showed me that she cared about me the most, but because I realized I behaved myself like a stubborn ass the way I treated my grandma for so many years.

An attitude that fed a false ego and dragged me in a play that wasn't mine. The pain and the tears though had to be my teacher, and even now typing on this post, I feel regrets towards my behavior. I know that they won't solve anything, but that's how I feel. How hard would have been for me to call more often or to close my ears when she was saying something I didn't agreed with? She was probably right in some cases you know...

I was an idiot though and such regrets and pain are the painful chairs that life serves us to make us aware and help us overcome what we currently are. To teach us the lesson and to memorize it, so we don't repeat it again. Pain makes memories alive. Do we all learn though? Unfortunately not... No act is a random act in one's life though, that I know for sure, and in each one we currently live, we plant the seed that we are going to harvest in a future act. You can call it karma...

As Galen ends his posts every time I would advise you, and myself as well, to "design and create your own life, don't live it by default, and choose the best colors and the most beautiful ones in that design, you/we have that option. We are all painters of our own life's canvases and it's in our hands to choose wise, and to choose with the heart.

Thanks for attention,
Adrian