Pain? Or discomfort?

I grew up with a binary understanding of pain, established by my dad through a simple diagnostic question:

Is it pain? Or is it discomfort?

When I fell and scraped my knees bloody, after running around an abandoned parking lot, he carried me to the car, popped the trunk of his SUV, sat me down, and asked, “Is it pain? Or discomfort?”

At a friend’s house in New Jersey, playing around near the woods, I went back to the house with a hand full of splinters. Dad fetched a needle, bathed it with a lighter, and with each sliver (“Pain?”) only finished after confirming: “Discomfort.”

For household cuts and scrapes, the question came later, inside Dr. Dad’s office (i.e. my parents’ bathroom).

His medicine cabinet was under the sink and consisted of only two things: a tall bottle of hydrogen peroxide, in its dull, foreboding brown, and a bargain bag of cotton balls. The sight of the two together, even before the compound broke into foam and started eating at my skin, was enough to feel it sting. He’d let me pinch his hand (“Not pain, right? Only discomfort?”) until it was done.

As it turns out, the stuff isn’t actually so good as an antiseptic.

But that’s beside the point. And deciding whether it was pain or discomfort was never really the purpose, either.

Dad always knew it wasn’t pain. But it was only because he asked that I knew it was just discomfort.

Dark room

The years made us one dark room
until meeting flicked;
pupils shrank;
we adjusted.

Disembody

I made a recording of myself, left it, forgot about it, and then listened to it today, when I thought enough time had passed that I wouldn’t be able to remember what I had said.

It was very strange.

I’ve written before about feeling displaced from my own body when I watched my family’s home videos for the first time; when I saw myself moving and breathing and alive before a video camera, when I was too young to harbor any memory of where I was or what I was doing.

It felt like seeing a ghost, like something that was no longer alive was now living. Except the ghost was myself, and last I checked, I’m still breathing.

My experiment today was much the same.

Maybe the strangeness was mostly for the fact that I’m not accustomed to hearing myself speak in a recording. I cringe whenever I listen to the last voiceover I made, so I’ve kept a point of not trying to hear myself speak.

But after this, I might try again.

It’s no less strange hearing myself talk, but it does give me the kind of distance that I sometimes need, whenever I feel like I’m bogging myself down or whenever I start to feel out of touch with my own skin.

It’s worth doing again.

Boomerang

“Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society — nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.

The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close social cohesion.”

Where was this a few months ago? A year ago? Five?

I feel like it’s much more common to hear about the serendipitous moments (or maybe those are just the better stories to tell)—those moments where someone happened to receive the exact words they needed, at precisely the time they needed them; those “life changing moments” that permanently altered the course of their existence, or at the very least, changed the way they perceived their present situation (which could in itself change everything…maybe is the only reason why things change at all).

But I don’t hear as much about the moments when we got the advice we needed much too late—when we stumbled onto something we realized we’d finally learned, but goddammit, change would have happened a whole lot faster had Coincidence picked up the pace.

Or maybe we don’t hear about that more often because it doesn’t really happen at all.

Maybe, for those “life changing moments” to occur, we have to make ourselves ready for them—and that’s what creates the change.

Maybe lessons don’t act quite like random acts of fortune that fall from the sky. Maybe they behave more like boomerangs—they require some action on our part to launch them into motion, and only then, when we position ourselves in the right place, do we unite with them.

If I had read that same quote a year ago (it’s from a guy called Einstein; you might have heard of him), there’s no telling what I would have done with it.

I might not have bookmarked it. I might not have even read it.

I certainly wouldn’t have written this post about it.

Maybe it’s only because I hadn’t read the words before that they mean anything to me now.

Cooking with contretemps

Let’s play make believe.

Make believe that time could be an experiment – that if only we had the right recipes, we could plot the events of our lives, make plans without anyone laughing.

I have this pre-, self-made belief that I can make motion: that I can make anything.

But it’s based just as much on the understanding of my own limitations, on the reality that there are no instructions and that even if there were, not everything will always go according to plan. I’d do better to remind myself, too, that the always possible possibility of failure isn’t necessarily because of something I lack (unless we’re talking about luck. Anyone can severely lack that).

Sometimes (oftentimes), in anything anyone makes, there’s a contretemps: a hurdle; an inopportune, unforeseen circumstance; a happening of shit, or a “motion out of time.”

Take your pick of definition. But let me take this moment to invent an antonym.

We can try as hard as we want to make a “pourtemps”: to hedge our bets with as many opportune, advantageous, self-designed events we want; to make such good prophecies, it’s almost like we made them.

But when we most feel like we can counter one, what we’re more likely to end up with is a ‘contre.’

That or just a steaming pot of disappointment.