Suffering is Mandatory
I have noticed a strange disconnect with my fellow man. The average person is frail. You can’t pick them up. You can’t poke them. A light shove induces a wounded animal response. If they bang their face or torso, they stop everything until they have made sure that they are okay. If there’s blood, it’s a crisis. Even very light pain is something to be feared and handled acutely. If you pick them up or shove them or prick them, they still scream and panic.
But people can deal with plenty of pain. People constantly suffer stoically through menstrual pains, hurting feet, migraines, etc. Tuning it out or breathing through it. It’s simply a byproduct of practice, usually thrust upon them by nature. What was once unmanageable becomes part of life. So why is externally induced pain so different?
External pain can often be avoided and it seems like a free lunch. But that avoidance invisibly circumscribes your life. Watch children play sometime and tell me how much pain they are risking at any moment: by running, throwing, putting hands on each other. They are not afraid of the pain — though they will not suffer it silently, as any adult will tell you — and can move bravely through their enviroment. Flinchiness is shyness. As an adult you gradually get waned off rough play, and at some point you find yourself afraid of falling.
Pain comes for everyone, so one day it must be actively avoided. Then managed. You spend so much time afraid avoiding impact that you get osteoperosis or fuck up a joint or stop doing an activity you love while you “work through” some pain but you never get through, you get stuck and this is your life now.
You are fighting to improve (or play). The opponent is an incidental conduit of chaos that you will have to deal with.
Pain is especially transcendent when you deserve it. Your thigh would not feel like there’s a red hot rod of iron under your skin if you had blocked the low kick instead of eating it with your hamstring. Your head wouldn’t be spinning if you hadn’t dropped your hands while kicking. That gut punch is the price you paid for delivering even more to the other guy. Like a rat in a Skinner box you get shocked because you fucked up in the noble pursuit of a piece of cheese.
You also get better at ignoring your pain and moving forward anyway, for as long as necessary. You don’t stop because something hurts. You can tend to your wounds after, but for now you keep your head in the game. As you get better at ignoring the pain it also hurts less. Things hurt more when you’re afraid of the pain. If you don’t let it crowd your mind it doesn’t need to be addressed. You suffer. You don’t need comfort. It’s freeing.
Much like cave divers learn, through exposure, to crawl through spaces that would give me the deepest panic attack of my life, and they can do so while smiling and making jokes, fighters learn to hurt and just deal with it. Most of the pain is not injurious; it’s just pain.
You probably don’t walk around in a world where you could get kicked in the stomach at any time, nor should you. But if you are used to being kicked in the stomach, maintain your composure, and keep your head in the game, then most physical pain and aggression in everyday life seem puny in comparison.
Walking towards and through pain is an immense source of power. Not just because it “builds character” or “makes you tougher” but because you learn to become acquainted with it, like a dark thought or a neurosis that you come face to face with and wrestle with on a therapy couch. You build strategies for handling it but also learn that it will pass. That what hurts is not going to hurt forever. It’s meditative, soothing even. The pain of fighting is a lot like shadowwork. Standing in front of something dangerous and dancing towards it with no idea whether the tools you have are sufficient is freakishly scary the first time, thrilling the 20th time, and merely interesting the 200th time.
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