Pain Over Nothing

Faulkner had a point. You can’t be a writer and choose nothing. Pain creates. Distraction is fundamental to writing. Think about it. Have you ever told a story about something that happened exactly the way it should have?
No.
Why? Because that would be boring, and nobody would want to hear it.
We all have those friends, who choose nothing over pain, and we all scoff at the inadequacy and lack of interest in their lives. If you chose nothing over pain, you would choose not to love; to never feel passion; to never know the depth of your own heart, or anyone else’s.
If you chose nothing over pain, you would choose to never have excitement, to never feel the wind in your hair as you ride a motorcycle down a winding mountain road, or to never know the thrill of any one of the many beauties that are life. If you chose nothing, you would never taste the bitter, and could never know the sweet.
You would never know how it feels to have done your best, to have tried your hardest, and to have failed. Victory would taste to you like cardboard; although true victory comes only after risk, pain, heartache and heartbreak. So you would never know a real victory, either. You would never know the exhilaration of breaking a rule; any rule; just to break it, and to feel the pain that you gambled with in doing so.
It takes balls to want pain; to desire the flip side of pleasure…but without one, who can truly know the other?
Harmony, peace, hope, chaos, war, death…all of life is a cycle; a struggle for balance, and you cannot know evil without pure good, as you cannot know the truth without lies. You simply cannot know what pleases you without the comparison of pain. To know true pain is to experience true and perfect joy at every opportunity to its fullest.
I’ll give you an example.
Say, I went to the store, and when I got home, I illustrated this grand story for my spouse…
“I walked up the street,” I would say, “and everything was calm. Nothing particularly odd happened. There were no people on the street with me. I got to the store, and purchased what I wanted with the bare minimum of necessary conversation…you know, ‘Will that be all?’. ‘Yes, thank you.’ ‘Five dollars and thirty-seven cents’…and so on. So, I came home, and there was still a calm, serene experience in walking down the street. Nothing happened to me or around me, and then I got here. And here is your milk. Now, I’ll eat my candy bar.”
My spouse would think that I had lost my damn mind. Naturally, he would take for granted that everything went normally and smoothly if I didn’t have anything to tell him about my trip to the store. He might think this a mere descriptive exercise, but would no doubt stop listening at some innane point. And that’s what would happen; if everything always went “normally”; if life was always smooth and serene, you would take it for granted. You would stop listening. There would be no journey; only a small, narrow, empty road. There would be no point. To your story…to your life.
Now, say I went to the store, and there was some interruption, so now, I really have a story for my spouse;
“I notice these three guys,” I start off, “and they seem kind of shady, so I cross the street, even though they are pretty far behind me. Well, soon after, I notice that they’ve crossed the street, too. As an independent woman, I take my precautions, and cup the pepper spray I keep in my purse in my palm. Eventually, I can hear breathing behind me…they’ve gained, and now I consider the fact that I could be in trouble. It’s twilight, but it’s a school night, so there are very few cars on the road, and the store is still 2 blocks away. I speed up as part of a natural instinct to distance myself, but they match my pace, so I drop back, figuring that it’s better to have them in front of me than behind me. Plus, that’s the way the wind is blowing, and more likely to carry the spray. One of them keeps pace with me and the other two flank us just ahead. I press a little harder on the button of my pepper spray, so that in one fluid motion, I’ll be able to get away. The guy doesn’t say anything, he just grabs the purse (which is double-wrapped around my shoulder) and pulls, hard. I lift my hand, spray, and run, but the guy, despite one hand going to protect his face, still has a hold of my purse. I yank it, hearing a crack. My world goes dark for a split second, but I’m running, on pure instinct and adrenaline. The pain in my shoulder is fierce, but not enough that I think it’s broken or I’ve dislocated it, and I run, as fast as I can, all the way to the store.
“When I get there, a cop is running security in the parking lot, and I tell him my story. He sends someone to get the guys, takes my statement, and gives me a ride home. Oh, right, I forgot the milk…will you go get it?”
Now, you understand, this girl could have died, or been much more seriously injured had she not been prepared…but these guys are off the streets and she’s okay, and they can’t do it to anyone else…
I mean, we concede that someone else might not have been prepared, right? So, really, it’s a good thing they attacked someone who was. And she wasn’t seriously hurt, and being the good-natured person she seems to be, I’m sure she’d rather experience a bruised shoulder than see another woman dead, or raped, or mugged.
The choice between pain and nothing is like asking someone if they’d rather live longer for its emptiness or live a life worth living. I’d rather live a life that’s a journey, tell a story with a point, then to shut myself away and never know love or hope or fear or pain.


Word Count= 1,050 words