Pain, Fear, & Physical Activity

I love pain, I love fear, and I love physical activity. I love these three because they remind me of something, that I am alive. I remember my car accident, the one I nearly died in and it awoke something in me. When I regress to that time, the feelings of fear, but mostly of the will to live arose so strongly. There was no flash of my life before my eyes, there was the screaming in my head, “Not yet!”

Fear is something I struggle with, because I really do not “feel” it. Anytime a small amount of fear arises in me, it is only out of caution, like do not get to close to the edge of this rock ledge, because there is no railing. If I am up high, I look down, if there is a railing I lean against it and stare at it. Once in a while I get startled, but that can be hard to do, because I am normally very aware of my environment. I am usually the one that does the scaring. My friends tell me I get this expression that scares them, this creepy smile just gets on my face and my eyes just change when I’m about to do something to scare one of them. I used to scare my family a lot, it was fun playing the trickster on all of them.

As for pain, I love pain. It gets my endorphins running, adrenaline pumping through my veins and part of this is why I love tattoos and piercings. I honestly do not care when I am older and my skin is saggy, that my tattoos are not going to look like they once were. I am still going to make my back a canvas of art. As for the piercings I am modest since I do want to be a Nurse, there are none on my face, but I wish that people would judge not for what you do to your body but by your actions. Pain to me almost equals pleasure, but please, do think I am a BDSM person, I honestly do not fit into the crowd. I like some pain, but what they like is not my style. I got my own style. Of course I am in constant pain too, my knees has tendinitis in them that hurts almost every day. My lower back has a malformed bone so I have to twist then bend, or vice versa, I cannot twist and bend or I’ll be on the floor withering in pain. Pain reminds me I am growing older, that I am not younger. With each year, I do grow a little more wiser, as I understand what I did not before, but it is still not something I look forward to. It still reminds me that I am alive, whether the pain is of my choice or not. Here I am, alive, growing older day by day.

As for physical activity, it makes me feel more alive than fear or pain. Endorphins are running through me as I run, bike, hike, white water raft, etc. I love to dance and be in a rave. Physical activity, especially dancing, is meditation for me, like soup for the soul. There grows to be a quiet focus in me as I dance within the crowd, or mountain bike in the quarry, or quietly hiking and observing the world around me. There is a quality there that I sometimes lack to achieve when I am sitting by myself. I employ emptiness, attempting to be a void in my mind at times because my thoughts run a million miles, like a river overflowing its banks finding its way to another source. Maybe that is not the best analogy.

Yet all of it reminds me, here, now, this is my moment. In this moment I am not dead. The quote that keeps running through my head is from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “I’m not dead yet!” Actually I think I am going to go watch that, kick back and enjoy. I’ve been catching up some social time since moving back in with my parents, several states away from my boyfriend.

Listening to the Message of Myth by Joseph Campbell

Listening to this lecture was interesting because, well, to be honest, the one part I really wish I could have heard more was where Campbell as a guru how can we accept “evil?” Actually that would be what I would want to ask any deity, why must we accept this violence, this brutality? Yet it is a part of life, let alone the human condition. Violence is…part of Nature. Yet certain violence of Nature is impersonal and needed for life to continue. It is the spider eating the fly cycle. Why must suffering be there? It just is. Without suffering, without violence, if everything was truly peace and not moving, nothing would change. Everything would be stagnant. Atoms are constantly moving, does it mean change? Well it is no longer in the same spot, it keeps going forward, that is part of what life is. What becomes stagnate, dies, and becomes back part of the World. We are brought into this world through the violence of our birth, we live our live with constant suffering and change and then we die. We get buried within the earth, our bodies decay and we naturally become part of the Earth, let alone the energies of ourselves being released back into the Universe.

Campbell mentioned that we are so busy achieving things of outer value that we forget about being alive. Yet what is being alive without action? Yes being at rest in the center is a beautiful thing, have inner values and inner appreciation is great. Yet when we forget about the physical world, we loose touch with reality and what is to be learned from it. Reality is the constant trial. As one person told me once, Earth is Hell, it is through these fires that we are forged into a better person. Sometimes in the action of doing we become alive, but it depends what your action is too. I do think doing cheap actions were you shout YOLO is worth risking your life. Yet when I am in the middle of a rave dancing, I feel so alive. I do not feel alive driving really fast on the highway, that is just dangerous. I enjoy white water rafting, it is a thrill for me because of the physical excretion. I plan on skydiving next year, wonder what I will feel then. What makes us feel alive is so different for each person, sometimes it is the action of being in service, sometimes it is physical excretion…what makes you tick basically.

My favorite was though how the concept of God is what transcends all. That God is our idea of what is beyond our feeble words. The best things can’t be told and the second best is what is misunderstood and third is what we talk about. Myth, legends, bible, koan, it is all to help point towards what is beyond words. They are illusion stories to make us think, but also a journey for our minds. I find myself often caught up in the stories and becoming so immersed in the story that I feel as the main character feels, their losses and their triumphs.

Is machine going to crush humanity or will it serve humanity? For each of us this differs, do we loose ourselves to the pounding of society or do we arise from it, a different person than that of someone who has plugged themselves in. As in the matrix, do you take the red pill or the blue pill?