What Does Not Kill You

Sep 15, 2013 by     Comments Off on What Does Not Kill You    Posted under: Expressions, General, Opinions

“Pain is good” says Silas from my favorite mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code while trying to murder Jacques Saunière. This phrase somehow clicked and touched my heart instantly and in fact it was the reason I kept reading this novel even though I am not into reading endlessly long books. As much as this sentence looks straightforward, it is actually not that simple. “Pain is good.” It is something more meaningful and deep than you first think. And yet, how can pain be good? Pain is when it hurts. Pain is when you are broken down into pieces. Pain is when you die helplessly, gradually, every day. Pain is what you can do absolutely nothing about and it seems to have no remedy. Pain is when you feel dejected, rejected and injected with grief and anguish. If this is all what pain is, then what made Dan Brown think “Pain is good”? There is little doubt in the intellect of Dan Brown and yet he came up with something that most of us may find absurd, especially those who have been through some kind of pain themselves; some real devastating kind of pain.

Pain hurts. The pain of losing someone we love, which almost all of us have felt at some stage in life, feels like a sharp blade going through your skin, cutting deep into your body, into your organs, your bones, leaving you unable to breathe. The person who has left you, who has not cared enough to be a part of your life any longer, seems like a heartless butcher, who ruthlessly stabbed you again and again either with their memories or with their fading presence until you falter, until you fall, until you have no more left, until you give it all up, until you quit.

The pain of a failure, of defeat, or of an unaccomplished dream, feels like a poison which you have to swallow in excruciatingly slow but steady gulps while the rest of the world distances itself from you, stands in front of you, looks you in the eye and then laughs at your disappointment. You stand stranded on a bridge which has an end leading to the pitiless world, and the other end leading to a desert of your shattered dreams, and you don’t know which way to go. No choice except to surrender to the pain.

When in pain, you do not know what to do. How to escape before it kills you? But instead of killing it, you only feed it by listening to sad songs, holding on to old memories, watching depressing movies. In an effort to run away from pain, you eventually end up running towards it knowing that this is how it’ll all end; more tears for your pillow, sleepless nights, restless days, an aimless life. And just when you think the pain has evacuated your soul it returns hunting for you again, strikes back harder and looks for another chance to bring you down. Well, this is what pain is.

But life never ends, at least not when you want it to or are expecting it to. It continues to move on. You pick yourself up again after every blow, you promise yourself this time you will never let pain get the better of you. You promise yourself you will never repeat the mistakes of the past again. You convince yourself that people come and go. You convince yourself to let go of someone you had loved. You convince yourself to live for what you can achieve than to die for something which never was in your destiny.And by doing all this, you increase the boundaries of what you can take and endure. You may end up with heartbreak again but it is human psychology that pushes you; that strong impulse carried by the pain somehow forces all of us to transmit ourselves from one phase in life to the next, no matter how difficult the transition.

Failure is what teaches man his life’s greatest lessons. And pain is what makes man grow beyond what he is. As the famous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said, ‘What does not kill you, only makes you stronger’, I uphold Dan’s view: pain, truly, is good.

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