Pain. I love it. Maybe you should love it too. And the longer you’ve carried it and more intense it has been, the more you love it when it’s gone. But you will learn, that like a faithful companion, it doesn’t stay away for long. Not if you are alive and living.
When I was a teen, I sometimes wore these 5 pound ankle weights during my days at Wasatch Junior High School. I was a Wasatch Warrior. Then when summer came, I went on a fifty mile week long hike with a 50 or more pound pack through the Uintas and up Kings Peak, with Mark Smith, his brother Steve and their friend Peter Campbell, who had toes as long as a monkey’s.
We knew this because in camp each evening, he would discard his shoes and peel his sock off to unveil those toes and sing the song, “I have ten toes, and I keep them as my-men-toes...” Then he would comb his hair and pick his belly button lint out with them before retiring to a nearby tree to hang ten upside down from a convenient branch.
In the winter I would ski all day on Saturdays at Park City West (The Canyons) and then in the evening go swimming to earn my swimming and life saving merit badges. A few skills we had to learn were retrieving weights off the bottom of the pool, towing a fellow Scout the length of the pool, and treading water while fully dressed until permission was given to strip them off and make them into a life raft in case we were ever on a cruise or a Lake Powell boating excursion and fell overboard and nobody noticed. I am still waiting to use those skills.
I was told these activities would make me strong and turn me into Eric Heiden or Dan Gable and give me a little cachet with the women. And they did, in part. But I probably could have done just as well bowling, playing Marco Polo in the pool or Red Rover or learning to play the guitar.
Yet, they did something else. At times, for awhile with those ankle weights, the backpack, the wet clothes on in the pool, I got used to them and didn’t notice the burden until fatigue set in with its follow-on friend of exertional pain. Then, when I unbuckled the ankle weights, slid the pack off, or jettisoned the wet clothes, I always had this amazing sensation of lightness. The longer I had borne the burden, the greater the sensation and the longer it lasted.
Pain is like those weights, that pack, those wet clothes. You drag it around. If you are lucky, it’s not too punishing, and you have the physical, emotional and mental resilience and facility to ignore or push it outside your consciousness, or to focus on more compelling things like surviving, it becomes just like white noise to our ears. So we drag it along without complete awareness of the burden.
Then-with some beneficial medical treatment, drug, injection, surgery, meditation method, or good sex-we unbuckle, slip off or jettison that pain, maybe for an hour, a few weeks, months or even years. When that happens, because your body has become numb to the burden it has been bearing and has forgotten what it was like to be pain free, it’s like you’ve been reborn, it’s like a huge weight has been lifted from your shoulders. You experience this wonderful sense of lightness, like you are walking on air. Like you are once again a Wasatch Warrior who could think that putting on those 5lb ankles weights to walk around in is a sensible thing to do.
No wonder so many are tempted to do anything to maintain that sense of renewal. It’s such a liberating experience, and in that moment we love our pain so much that we think we can go back there to stay, back there to be that Wasatch Warrior. But we can’t. Not completely. Not until we can figure out how to regenerate like salamanders. So, try the treatments that can safely work, but, if at all possible, don’t love your pain so much that you feed it opiates. Too many of my clients have died going down that road, or have become addicted and alienate their common sense and their families.
Just think of that pain as your ankle weights or backpack that you have to haul around to get stronger on that fifty mile hike. As for me, since I’m going to live until I’m 110, I’m going to have to get used to a lot of white noise from the pain that I have been blessed enough to work around. Yet have compassion for those who are not so blessed or resilient. It often is truly not their fault. Living with pain sometimes is too heavy a burden. We can’t all tote around 50 lb packs and wear ankle weights until our death beds.
So, in the mean time, I have to have gratitude for modern medicine and I have to be grateful with the realization that the load I’ve been carrying allows me, in direct proportion thereto, to experience a hopefully enduring sense of lightness and liberation at this time. I am a Warrior once again, walking on the clouds. But don’t ask me to put on any ankle weights. That would not be a sensible thing to do. I’ll leave that to the real Warriors.
Loren M. Lambert, Winter Solstice, 2015 ©
When I was a teen, I sometimes wore these 5 pound ankle weights during my days at Wasatch Junior High School. I was a Wasatch Warrior. Then when summer came, I went on a fifty mile week long hike with a 50 or more pound pack through the Uintas and up Kings Peak, with Mark Smith, his brother Steve and their friend Peter Campbell, who had toes as long as a monkey’s.
We knew this because in camp each evening, he would discard his shoes and peel his sock off to unveil those toes and sing the song, “I have ten toes, and I keep them as my-men-toes...” Then he would comb his hair and pick his belly button lint out with them before retiring to a nearby tree to hang ten upside down from a convenient branch.
In the winter I would ski all day on Saturdays at Park City West (The Canyons) and then in the evening go swimming to earn my swimming and life saving merit badges. A few skills we had to learn were retrieving weights off the bottom of the pool, towing a fellow Scout the length of the pool, and treading water while fully dressed until permission was given to strip them off and make them into a life raft in case we were ever on a cruise or a Lake Powell boating excursion and fell overboard and nobody noticed. I am still waiting to use those skills.
I was told these activities would make me strong and turn me into Eric Heiden or Dan Gable and give me a little cachet with the women. And they did, in part. But I probably could have done just as well bowling, playing Marco Polo in the pool or Red Rover or learning to play the guitar.
Yet, they did something else. At times, for awhile with those ankle weights, the backpack, the wet clothes on in the pool, I got used to them and didn’t notice the burden until fatigue set in with its follow-on friend of exertional pain. Then, when I unbuckled the ankle weights, slid the pack off, or jettisoned the wet clothes, I always had this amazing sensation of lightness. The longer I had borne the burden, the greater the sensation and the longer it lasted.
Pain is like those weights, that pack, those wet clothes. You drag it around. If you are lucky, it’s not too punishing, and you have the physical, emotional and mental resilience and facility to ignore or push it outside your consciousness, or to focus on more compelling things like surviving, it becomes just like white noise to our ears. So we drag it along without complete awareness of the burden.
Then-with some beneficial medical treatment, drug, injection, surgery, meditation method, or good sex-we unbuckle, slip off or jettison that pain, maybe for an hour, a few weeks, months or even years. When that happens, because your body has become numb to the burden it has been bearing and has forgotten what it was like to be pain free, it’s like you’ve been reborn, it’s like a huge weight has been lifted from your shoulders. You experience this wonderful sense of lightness, like you are walking on air. Like you are once again a Wasatch Warrior who could think that putting on those 5lb ankles weights to walk around in is a sensible thing to do.
No wonder so many are tempted to do anything to maintain that sense of renewal. It’s such a liberating experience, and in that moment we love our pain so much that we think we can go back there to stay, back there to be that Wasatch Warrior. But we can’t. Not completely. Not until we can figure out how to regenerate like salamanders. So, try the treatments that can safely work, but, if at all possible, don’t love your pain so much that you feed it opiates. Too many of my clients have died going down that road, or have become addicted and alienate their common sense and their families.
Just think of that pain as your ankle weights or backpack that you have to haul around to get stronger on that fifty mile hike. As for me, since I’m going to live until I’m 110, I’m going to have to get used to a lot of white noise from the pain that I have been blessed enough to work around. Yet have compassion for those who are not so blessed or resilient. It often is truly not their fault. Living with pain sometimes is too heavy a burden. We can’t all tote around 50 lb packs and wear ankle weights until our death beds.
So, in the mean time, I have to have gratitude for modern medicine and I have to be grateful with the realization that the load I’ve been carrying allows me, in direct proportion thereto, to experience a hopefully enduring sense of lightness and liberation at this time. I am a Warrior once again, walking on the clouds. But don’t ask me to put on any ankle weights. That would not be a sensible thing to do. I’ll leave that to the real Warriors.
Loren M. Lambert, Winter Solstice, 2015 ©
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