Playing with pain
Dale Keiger has a great post about the pride of playing with pain, which ends:
My less-than-profound conclusion was that there is some peculiar but deep satisfaction in proving to yourself that you can endure, even in something as meaningless as a softball game. Maybe we seek reassurance that we can persevere through whatever might lie ahead in our lives. Maybe it’s something atavistic. Maybe it’s the way pain forces one to be all the more present, alert and fully engaged, which is half the reason I play sports.
In his first book, Anthony Bourdain described how after years of work as a chef, he looked at himself and realized he had the hands he’d always wanted: scarred, misshapen, battered, true chef’s hands. I knew exactly what he meant.
And it made me think of two things. The first was that, contrary to what might be the facile conclusion, I don’t think this is a macho thing – i.e. in any way confined to athletes of the male persuasion or even a warrior’s boast. It’s quite possibly a very natural human drive, and particularly exhilarating for those of us who generally endure very little physical slog or suffering. Like Dale says, it’s a way of reminding us that we’re alive, puts us fully and brutally in touch with our physicality – something that those masses of us with sedentary professions are forced to mute 8 hours a day.
While my days of bone-crushing team sports are pretty much behind me (girls’ field hockey is brutal, man), I still derive great satisfaction from the ache after a long stretch of power gardening and the ow ow ow of an extra round of pilates – and I’m regularly given pause when doing something so tedious as the laundry by what an ordeal the chore once was (my god, the biceps those women must have had).
The second thing that came to mind is more confounding, namely the emotional pain and stress that so many women of my generation have chosen to inflict upon themselves. This compulsion to set outrageous standards of achievement – convinced that we are not fully realised if we are not outstanding at work, as parents, in the kitchen, in the bedroom… and then some.
Even those of us who have suffered the gruel and desperate isolation of single motherhood feel it only natural to expect we also be perfect fathers. (Now, that’s messed up.)
And I know that this is a much-discussed topic, but I have yet to hear a convincing explanation for this harsh definition of achievement – some feeling it’s a very natural over-compensation for newly-liberated females who grew up with housebound souls as their role models, while others will say we’re just busting chops… and still others: what’s the big deal?
While perhaps not spurred by the same impulses as the need to keep on playing when your body is screaming at you to ease up – even if that’s how it can feel at times – the wretched added drawback to this drive to do everything well (with style and grace, but of course) is indeed that everything bit: no reasonable limits, in other words, no bench and ice pack, no celebratory pizza and beer in sight.
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Comment
- From conversations with my own mother regarding this topic I got the impression that quite a bit of it stems from guilt, perhaps over the fact that the child isn’t being given a normal life. Whatever the heck that means nowadays.
— Bryan Fillmer Jun 25, 5:53pm # - Yadda-yadda. What’s for dinner? And hey, get me a beer while you’re up.
(Just a humor test, really.)
— Don McArthur Jun 26, 4:06am # - I think that the desire to succeed and more than succeed is in our DNA. You look at the folks we come from, our parents and our grandparents, and you wonder how could they do everything they did in the face of what they faced. And then if you stop and think about your grandparents’ grandparents and the set before that, your mind gets blown away with the kind of hard-scrabble, no-win, always snowing and hailing lives they had.
Honestly, what do we have here? World Wars, Depressions, Flu Epidemics, malaria, more Great Depressions, Potato Famines, immigrations from one far off place to another far-off and bad and inhospitable place, Napoleans and Genghis Khans chewing up the scenery and driving hordes across the landscape, your cows getting eaten up by locusts, your wheat fields trembling before prairie fires, not to mention blizzards, floods, volcanoes, and ice storms without number. And the list goes on and on.
Life, I hate to say this, is like the Apocalypse every saturday night since the dawn of time.
And yet people keep going and trying to do things right.
And to get back to the original post:
That little bit of pleasure we feel in that little bit of pain is there for a reason. When the world fails us and Hurricane Katrina or the next even bigger Hurricane Katrina comes screaming down at us like a giant cawing nightmare, we’ll huddle there until it’s blown itself out, and then we’ll get up out of the muck and look around and feel that bit of pleasure and bit of pain and start trying to build it better and stronger and cleaner than it ever was before.
It’s the way we are.
— john guzlowski Jun 26, 9:59pm # - This will unavoidably leap from the screen as the most obvious reactionary meme musterable; but why? That we do this enjoys paramount tenability. That we will continue to do this is just about as certain, until things change sufficiently that we can’t anymore. That we contrive a nearly innumerable set of explanations of relatively little variability about the answer to that obvious question isn’t controversial. That those contrived explanations ever—even in the aggregate, taken piece-wise by the quality of the explanation—approach utility let alone accuracy…well, I suppose that begs the question asked. How can we know?
I don’t want to derail this any more than I may have already, and show any more of my naivete. Still, is the best answer simply that we’re coded to continue, all our attempts to understand the drive notwithstanding? You might follow that (as I have) to wonder at the evolutionary utility of suicide, for instance—a self-selection for poor survivability on some criterion or another. You might follow that to wonder a whole lot of things. Maybe it’s worth asking if we can know if there even is an answer?
— Daniel Jun 27, 8:33pm # - Can we know why we do things?
For a long time, religion offered the answers. Then for a shorter time, psychology offered the answers. Now it’s the biologists or who ever it is who works up the DNA answer.
Next year, or the year, some one will come up with another way of looking at what moves us, motivates us, directs us.
So where are we?
People do things and other people try to explain those things. The explanations fall to the way side but people still do things.
Maybe the problem is that we’re spending too much of our energy trying to explain things that don’t need explanation.
— john guzlowski Jun 27, 8:49pm # - John, I wholeheartedly (and preemptively, even) agree: we do things, and short of some phenomenally drastic change, we will continue to do things, whether we try to understand them or not. However, given that some of the most notable of those things can be boiled down to judgement of the doing of others—enter the thesis to the post on which we’re commenting—I’m not sure it’s outlandish to at least attempt apprehension of why as fundamentally as we can.
Also, you seem to imply that each generation of explanation is roughly equivalent in its impotency to the last. The lack of an objective measure notwithstanding, biophysics as applied to cerebral chemistry offers greater predictive power than did phrenology. What no currently available or theorized approach (of which this layman is aware) offers is “the answers”. I can’t remember a serious conjecture in what little exposure I’ve had to psychology or other related topics proposing that all the answers had been found. It seems the posture of these fields is that we often find better questions rather than answers. Along the way, though, if a diagnosis of schizophrenia with attendant pharamceutical treatment provides a richer understanding of someone—most importantly for that person—than their being accused of witchcraft, I think it’s tenable to argue we’re closer to whatever the answers would be.
Maybe the problem (if there is one) is that we’re spending too much of our energy trying to dissuade people from explaining things whether they need explanation or not, given that attempts at explanation are simply things some of us do.
— Daniel Jun 29, 4:58pm # - Are there really people who are trying to dissuade people from explaining things?
I don’t think I’ve seen a lot of that.
In fact, the world seems filled with explainers. Whenever something happens-a roller coaster disaster at Disney World, a Supreme Court decision, an increase in the violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians, a new fashion statement from Paris Hilton-there are explainers and explanations everywhere we turn.
The air is full of their buzz and whispers.
If there is something in our DNA that helps us to work through pleasure/pain, there is probably also something in our DNA that has us reaching for explanation.
As Kurt Vonnegut says in Slaughterhouse-5, earthlings are the great explainers.
Can we ever hope to turn down the level of explanation?
Probably not.
Should we try?
Maybe.
Join me in trying.
— john guzlowski Jul 1, 2:07am # - “Are there really people who are trying to dissuade people from explaining things?”
“Maybe the problem is that we’re spending too much of our energy trying to explain things that don’t need explanation.”
— Daniel Jul 5, 8:00pm # - I could explain why those two statements don’t conflict or contradict.
Just as you can.
But what would be the value to you or to me or to anybody reading this.
I’m reminded of Frost’s poem Mending Wall. Remember it?
The speaker in the poem is thinking about why he and his neighbor are working on mending this wall, and he wonders why they are because it seems pointless.
Here’s what the speaker in the poem says about lifting and positioning the rocks on the wall,
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more….
— john guzlowski Jul 6, 2:19pm # - John, I’ll admit to having an argumentative streak, but I don’t want this to amount simply to an exchange of rhetoric on my part. I can understand and empathize with the sentiment that we’ve come to almost fetishize explanation, a sort of neurotic fastidiousness of categorization and description. We might experience less than we interpret.
The flip side, though, is that we often seem to only experience precisely those things we might should interpret. Things like our role as informed agents in the political system; or parenting; or religion; or any of those other easy targets. Maybe what you and I are really volleying is just the matter of striking the right balance. While I’m not convinced there is necessarily “a place” for humans, as cliché as that sounds (or is), if there is any purpose in us, I’d wager it’s got a lot to do with our capacity for abstraction and description, i.e. explanation.
Again—and, yeah, this is a little cutesie of me—explanation is no less “something we do” than is laying brick, or squeezing mud between our fingers, or playing with pain. That’s no exemption from moderation, sure, else we’ve no right to expect people to behave reasonably well. I just think it’s got its place, but—as I think you’d agree—maybe that place isn’t as sprawling as a culture of talking heads has made it.
So here’s to knowing when to think…and when to just feel.
— Daniel Jul 6, 4:56pm #
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