The point of pain

Pain is the main driving force for action, but often when the pain stops, so does the action. How might we remember pain for greater action? Or is there a better question to ask?

My wife, amongst other women, often jokes that until I am able to push a large watermelon out of my ass, or some other approximation of childbirth, I cannot truly know what real physical pain is.

She, and they, are right, of course.

I, nor any many, literally cannot imagine the pain of childbirth

It appears, on the outside, to be so ridiculously grievous, in a way so obscene, that you can’t help wondering why on earth any woman would ever choose to do it again.

But some woman do choose to do it again — some women choose to do it again and again — and they do so not just because their precious, miraculous newborn is worth it.

They do so because pain has no memory.

We might remember something of a feeling, even if it’s just a spectral shadow of the real feeling.

Times of great fear, moments of courage, the rush of jealousy and fleeting episodes of a host of other emotions all leave some stamp on our psyche. We can, if we just compel our minds to do it, recall something of great confidence even when our morale is at a low ebb.

We can be inflicted by trauma, and have that trauma rise up again at an innocuous trigger — a loud bang, say, or an unwelcome hand on a shoulder —but trauma is the debilitating and often recurring effect of the extreme emotions of painful moments, especially psychologically painful moments.

Trauma is the recurring emotions, not the recurring pain.

But pain itself, the acute physical manifestation, leaves no trace of memory.

“Within ten minutes, the pain was gone and I was overcome with what I can only describe as pure and unconditional love…”

When we feel pain, we are driven to immediate and imperative action to bring that pain to an end, to get rid of it.

The more acute the pain, the more violent the action.

This is, I think, a big part of the reason suicide seems so inexplicable to those left behind. It’s not just that those left behind don’t understand how a mind might act in this way. It’s because they — we — have never experienced what it is that pre-empts suicide: a wholly final and unbearable pain at the very center of one’s being.

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Suicide is the total, irreversible and complete response against an extreme and all-engrossing pain.

Over the past few years I’ve had the opportunity to experience extreme pain.

The pain has, thankfully, been extreme in the acute and physical variety rather than the acute and psychological one which can bring on thoughts of suicide.

A little over two years ago I ended up in the Accident & Emergency unit one morning, so great was the pain inside my head.

It was a pain that had me on all fours on my bedroom floor, pressing my head into the carpet to try to get to the unreachable itch — itch times a thousand — that seemed to have its epicenter three inches inside my skull.

That time, the nurses, noticing my inability to take my hand away from my head, found me a bed and hooked me up to the most beautiful mobile drip unit I’ve ever met.

Whatever was in that thing, it added up to bliss.

Within ten minutes, the pain was gone and I was overcome with what I can only describe as pure and unconditional love — love for whatever drug was dropping slowly into my vein; love for the people I’d never met and never would in some far-off pharmaceutical lab who had perfected the dose of this particular combination of enzymes, molecules and elements that was coursing through my body and making the pain go away and replacing it with bliss; love, pure love, for the nurse who’d wheeled the cart beside my bed and found the vein and walked to and fro for the next few hours, always purposeful, never rushing and looking for all the world like an angel come down from heaven and dressed in blue scrubs.

I recalled this moment again recently when that pain returned, a few inches lower in my head this time, behind my jaw and gums and cheek, a toothache that seems to be in all your teeth at once and in the bones above and below your teeth too.

It was a pain that required constant nursing with the heel of my hand pushed against my cheekbone, a pain which responded not at all to over-the-counter tablets, was partially numbed by several hot whiskeys laced with sugar and spices, and was dulled, thankfully if temporarily, by the heavy duty codeine painkillers I got after standing before a pharmacist and razzle-dazzling them with a sales pitch on the nature of my pain to make them consent to a two-day supply.

But the truth is, when the pain goes, it leaves no memory and only a trace of the feeling.

I only recalled something of the two-years-ago episode of carpet-nuzzling, skull-clutching and ER-visiting when the pain returned.

During this most recent episode, I was able to empathize fully with those faceless millions in America who became victims of the opioid epidemic.

There’s a scene in the recent Netflix series Painkiller where one of the main characters, a young man with a wife and family, owner of a vehicle workshop nursing an obscene level of pain following a forklift accident at work, pulls apart his whole kitchen in search of a single OxyContin tablet that would make the pain go away, even for a while.

When I saw that scene, the drama resonated, but I could never have felt his pain.

I know something of it now, but I also know that every day that passes, that memory will recede until it’s gone.

Pain drives action.

Pain renders everything else completely unimportant.

Pain carries a host of signals that compels us on the correct course of action.

I would do anything to get rid of this pain.

But when it’s gone, I forget. Everyone does.

As great pain begets the greatest action, solving for pain is a central hallmark of much of the best work and many of the greatest businesses too.

We might think we’re driven to seek pleasure or joy or happiness, but on the whole, people desire relief from pain much more than all that.

We might want pleasure, joy or happiness, but when we’re in pain, getting rid of that pain is a need of the highest order, and needs rule over all wants.

It is in this between-space where work and business tries to insert itself.

It’s why business consultants talk of “pain points”, and why sales directors try to find the exact person who has both the purse-strings and the pain.

Because nothing drives action more than pain.

Big problems create big pains. Big pains lead to big decisions and big actions.

(These life and business experiences, plus my own recent skirmishes with physical pain, made me empathize a little more — and I know this might sound crazy — with some of the people within the pharma companies behind the American painkiller/opioid crisis. Yes, the executives covered up the data that showed the addictiveness of those drugs; yes, they were driven much more by the lure of profit than the satisfaction of doing good; and yes, they deserve all the punishment they get. But none of us is either all good or all evil, and many of the people within those pharma businesses, the people who produced and promoted and pushed those drugs, will no doubt have witnessed the relief from pain the product brought, and from there were motivated to get the tablets into more people’s hands.)

So if it’s true that great action creates great results, and great pain prompts great action, and that pain has no memory, it presents us with a conundrum.

Our action will slow down and eventually stop when the pain runs out.

Which gives rise to a question:

How might we remember the pain so that we can keep taking the necessary action?

But maybe this is the wrong question.

Maybe there are other, better, questions to ask.

Such as:

Thanks for reading.

Till next time.