Change

Pain is simply a nervous system response to something wrong with your body. You’ve been cut, bruised, broken. You’ve been sitting, standing, or working too long. Your eyes are tired. Your stomach is empty. Disease has infiltrated your systems. You need help.

You need to change something.

Whether you ignore it, work through it, or pay attention to it, the pain isn’t really the cause of your suffering. It’s just the messenger. Like an indicator light in your car, alerting you in case you might veer off the road. Maybe the symptom is minor - or maybe the small aches and twinges add up to something more sinister, more severe. Either way the choice is yours.

What can you change?

It could be a chronic problem or habit, manifesting itself from years of wear and tear on your bones. Or it could be a simple fix, a one time crisis to handle and heal from. Maybe it’s a mental block, triggered by trauma rather than actual physical causes. It could mean losing part of yourself, and letting go of something diseased or unresponsive to your body’s calls. You have to listen to the pain to find out.

But once you do - can you really change?

Perhaps it’s too late for you. You’ve ignored the warning signs and now you’re too far gone for repairs. It could be there’s nothing for it, no medical marvel or cure-all for what ails you. Or maybe this is your last chance - a wake up call to start taking steps away from danger and the consequences that lie ahead.

Can you really afford not to change, is the question.

Because otherwise we remain fixated on our pain, on the strange sensation that creeps into our skin and takes root in our psyche. We allow it to settle in and grow, becoming our excuse or our cross. “Sorry,” we’ll say, when in reality we hear the clanging siren call to do something - anything - rather than stay the path.

At the end of the day is it really the pain we recoil from -- or is it the change that pain requires us to make?