I'm doing 35 things
Pain is a concept that has been given a bad connotation.
When in reality, it is the one true harbinger of growth.
Pain is not a hindrance. It is you who chooses to believe it is.
But there are many kinds of pain, and it is important to define the sort of pain that leads to growth.
It is the pain that defies your perceived limitations, the pain that scoffs at your anxiety, that goes against your feelings of distress, that mocks procrastination as an abomination of your reason for being.
It is this pain that settles only for your best self, and acts as a tool to smooth rough edges and construct bridges to reach destinations. This pain is the courage and discipline to do something you have the capacity to do, to be someone you want to be.
It is not the pain of loss, but the pain of being strong in the face of loss. Being strong enough to go on, and rise.
It is not the pain of being wronged or oppressed, but the pain of rising above the judgment that seeks to immobilize you, and to find happiness where you know it to be.
It is not the pain of thinking of what could have been, but the pain of shaping your fate as you would like it.
This is the pain that is good. Good pain as I define it for myself to be.
I leave it to my better judgment, based on the knowledge I have of myself and on my confidence that its perception of what is real from what isn’t is unclouded, to tell good pain from bad.
A life true to one’s reason and desires is one worth working at and dying for. It is one which has it’s definition shaped in my hands, one where good pain is exuberance and where settling for any less is living the greatest lie one can tell to one’s self.
