The Question of Pain

I was going to call this "the Gift of Pain" but I thought it might have a lot of people questioning my sanity or wondering what I was smoking.  It wasn't meant to suggest that pain was a gift but rather Pain came with a gift.  I also wondered if the distinction was too semantic or maybe philosophical.  In any event, I didn't call it that so why am I going on about what I didn't call this post?

I suppose the universal experience of pain is at the heart of empathy and compassion.  I don't know anyone who has never felt pain so I guess I don't know anyone who cannot, at some level, understand what another person's pain is like.  I think that is the gift which comes with Pain.  Having just gone through a few days of some of the most intense physical pain I've ever felt, I was struck by how it made me mindful of others.  I was thinking of other people I knew who were having different pain in their own lives. I was thinking also of friends & family who expressed concern and I also was thinking about the doctors & nurses in the world who pour their energy out in this particular arena.

So now we come to what I do have as the title, "The Question of Pain". 
I am struck by the variety of answers people have to pain.  This past week what really struck me personally is how our answer to pain can include or exclude community.  For myself, I will be paying attention to to my pain in the future, not to focus on it but to see it in relation to a community.  Typically we will all have some deep pain in our life at some point but our response my lead us into isolation - away from others.  What good does that do?

Community can be as little as two or as large as the world.  Pain can scale from a child getting a bee sting to a major catastrophe like 9-11.  I'm beginning to see that whenever there is pain, there follows in it's wake an opportunity for community.  It's our answer to the question.