Pain Is Inevitable; Suffering Is Optional !!

People have some common misconception that pain and suffering are same thing. I totally disagree with this. The truth is that suffering is something that we can choose and pain is something that we cannot.

First lets look at the standard definition of both the terms.


Pain: Pain is part of the body's defense system, triggering a reflex reaction to retract from a painful stimulus, and helps adjust behavior to increase avoidance of that particular harmful situation in the future. Given its significance, physical pain is also linked to various cultural, religious, philosophical, or social issues.

The best definition of Pain is given by Margo McCaffery as: Pain is whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever he says it does.

Suffering: The word suffering is sometimes used in the narrow sense of physical pain, but more often it refers to mental or emotional pain, or more often yet to pain in the broad sense, i.e. to any unpleasant feeling, emotion or sensation.


Those were the theoretical definition extracted from Wiki, now I'll try to explain it in my words.


Pain is something which is Inevitable and it has to be, life cannot go on in one (your favorable direction) direction at all the time it must take a turn and this causes mental pain. Pain and life are something which are interconnected so you cannot go away from it.

But it is upon us to how to feel the pain or "Suffer". Suffering is something which can be taken care of. It depends on you that how much you suffer from a pain.

Let me try to explain this with an example.

If there is a red light in a traffic signal then there are 3 kind of emotions which can come.

1. Being normal ( You are very much habitual to it)
2. Going cynical ( WTF!! every signal is red for me)
3. Taking it lightly ( How lucky I am, I again got rest from driving :) ).


The 2nd emotion is most common an people used to suffer from that everyday and third one is rarest .The best thing is none of these emotions are to change the event.. which is making light from red to green before time but all three are suffering differently.


So the point is the choice of your emotion is not going to change the pain but it is definitely going to decide your suffering.


My Special Theory:
As usual I am again posting my special theory over pain and suffering.

There is very beautiful thing about cycles ( waves, patterns, charts, biological cycle) and that is "Every cycle has to undergo a corrective phase at some period of time." or we can say that " No cycle can continue in one direction only, there is always one turning, one crash, one correction" and the best thing is that once this correction is over the things go back to normal.

Lets take the example of stock market ( my personal fav. :P) it cannot keep on rising in one direction there is always some correction at some point of time and after that correction the things go back to normal.

Now coming back to my theory, Pain is a type of correction phase in our life and we should not get depressed at time of pain. We should enjoy that we are having a corrective phase and after this phase we will see much brighter things. The more severe the pain the more you should enjoy because it will be followed by sharp upward waves ( Happiness).

I like to quote a dialogue from movie The dark Knight : The night is darkest just before the dawn.


So whenever you are in deep trouble and having so much physical or mental pain then just think of the Dawn.. It is on the way.


comments are invited